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High Speed 2

HS2 decisions still hampered by poor DFT management

Regarding the Opinion piece, “Decisions are needed now to deliver best value out of revised HS2 line” (NCE online, 5 December), it would be so much easier to make decisions if High Speed 2 Ltd and the Department for Transport (DfT) could produce credible, robust project schedules and current cost estimates in 2023 money for the constituent options, which remain after the debacle of the last 15 years.

However the project management and oversight by the DfT is apparently so shockingly poor that it will take them six months just to do that.

If only HS2 had been abandoned in or before 2013 as Lord Mandelson proposed in an article in the Financial Times in July. Dozens of smaller, but targeted and easily deliverable, projects might instead have been completed by now.

Simon Gell, (Via LinkedIn)

The Editor, New Civil Engineer,
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