UK: ‘I am determined to do this once only’, HS2 Ltd Chief Executive Mark Wild told the High Speed Rail Group’s annual conference in Birmingham on May 7 when describing the ‘reset’ of the high speed rail scheme which is now underway.
Wild told delegates that the government had given his team ‘the space needed’ to reset the project. This would essentially focus on rephasing the delivery of the various elements of the railway based on ensuring that tasks are delivered in a synchronised manner.
Reflecting on the work done on HS2 to date, Wild paid tribute to the efforts of his predecessors ‘in getting this thing to rise out of the ground’, noting that the main tunnelling works for the Old Oak Common – Birmingham section were now coming to a conclusion. Overall, he estimated around 50% of the major earthworks for the railway had been completed.
Nevertheless, he acknowledged that HS2 still faces some ‘big problems’. Indeed, overcoming these challenges to deliver the high speed line was one of his motivations for taking the role of CEO, he said.
‘I’ve frequently been asked over the past five months, why are you doing this role? I’m doing it for two reasons: firstly, I really believe in the force of agglomeration and bringing people together. As a coal miner’s son from County Durham, you can see the inequity that exists, I personally really feel it. Secondly — and here we’ve got to face the truth — the programme has become discontinuous and unco-ordinated. And I couldn’t stand by and see the project and the whole industry really not be productive’, he said.
Such is the level of what Wild termed ‘discontinuation’, he felt it was difficult to give a precise statement of how far through construction the project is. ‘We should be around 50% through by this stage, but the reality is we don’t know how far along we are’, he said, suggesting a more suitable estimate could be one-third.
‘The project has become disconnected from the reality of the site works’, he explained. ‘The process we’re going through is to put everything back into its logical sequence. It’s the civil engineering. Then we put the track on, then we put the overhead line up, and we put in the mechanical electrical systems, and we get the train to run up and down for a while, while we build reliability and we commission the railway.’
Describing the remainder of 2025 as ‘a really important moment to get the reset right’, he believed it was ‘the only time we will do this between now and the commissioning of the greenfield route between Old Oak Common and Curzon Street’. However, he was confident that the reset would achieve its aims, and he emphasised that every major project in his 40 years of experience needed a ‘reset moment’.
Citing his experience leading London’s Crossrail scheme in its latter stages, he said HS2 would learn from some of the issues faced by that project. A key aim of Wild’s is to ensure ‘people only do a job once’. He reflected on an example from Crossrail where a technician came to lay 1 km of cabling, but realised they only had access to 500 m because of outstanding work being done by another team. ‘That is the kind of issue we are trying to avoid with the reset’, Wild explained.
What went wrong
Key to the future of HS2 will be the need to ‘manage uncertainty’, Wild predicted. He believed that he understood how the project had got to the state it is in today. ‘I think we understand very well the roots of the problems of HS2’, he said, noting that these could help ‘the folk who want to take lessons forward into future high speed rail projects’.
He cited three main reasons for HS2’s well-publicised delays and cost overruns.
The first was the pace with which the project began construction. ‘We started without the design being properly mature’, Wild said, although he was at pains to stress this was not a criticism of those making the decisions at the time. ‘It’s 20/20 vision when you look back — I might have made the same decision.’
This lack of design maturity led to his second reason, an imbalance of risk that left the public sector carrying much more risk than the supply chain. ‘The risk all resides with the government side. A conscious decision, because we started without the design and consenting completed. But the lack of a commercial tension is a real issue and recognised, I think, by the great supply chain that we have.’
The third issue he identified was HS2 Ltd as project promoter ‘not being set up to be a delivery organisation’. He drew a comparison with Transport for London, where the Crossrail project ‘worked backwards from the end, not forward from today’. TfL believed ‘the most important person in the whole project was the person who drives the first train’, he added.
Wild concluded by insisting that delays and cost overruns were ‘utterly corrosive’ to the morale of the HS2 workforce and the wider supply chain. He insisted he was aware ‘we are spending huge amounts of money that could be spent elsewhere’, and that this year’s reset would be ‘our one shot at driving up productivity’. By the end of the year, it would be essential for ‘all 34 000 people working on HS2 to know their place in the project and the schedule they are working to’.
Nevertheless, once operational, Wild was adamant that HS2 would become ‘the cornerstone of our future railway network’, rather than something ‘grafted on top’.
‘It’s essential that this reset works — and I am absolutely confident that it will.’
