Jon Thompson to quit as HS2 chair as price of UK rail project soars

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The chair of Britain’s High Speed 2 rail project will step down in the spring, the government said on Tuesday, hours after the Financial Times reported that the price had risen by another £9bn.

Sir Jon Thompson will leave his post barely two years after taking the helm in February 2023, having previously sat on HS2 Ltd’s board for two years.

One railway industry executive said Thompson’s departure was not a surprise because ministers had appointed a new chief executive of HS2 and ordered a review of its remit and cost.

Thompson recently took up a board position at Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, owner of UK retailer Sports Direct. Sky News reported last month that he had been lined up to become Frasers’ chair in 2025.

But the government’s announcement came hours after the FT reported that an official report set to be published later on Tuesday will show an internal estimate that HS2 will cost between £54bn and £66bn at 2019 prices.

That cost estimate, disputed by the government, would mark a jump from a previous figure of between £49bn and £57bn a year ago. The new upper figure is equivalent to about £80bn in today’s prices.

Heidi Alexander, transport secretary, thanked Thompson for his “work over nearly four years to progress Britain’s largest rail project”, adding: “He has provided strong leadership during challenging times for the project.” 

Last year, the then Conservative government slashed the project in half, leaving only a section from London to Birmingham.

Thompson led HS2 as executive chair for 12 months when the project lacked a permanent chief executive, before incumbent Mark Wild arrived.

He has been ordered by ministers to carry out a review of the project including drawing up a new, detailed cost estimate.

Alexander said on Tuesday she expected Wild to be “gripping budgets and schedules and delivering the line as cost effectively as possible for passengers and taxpayers”.

Wild will seek to renegotiate some of the contracts that officials suggested had left HS2 “over a barrel” in its dealings with suppliers and contractors.

Thompson recently voiced his frustrations at planning issues and bureaucracy that had contributed to HS2’s spiralling costs.

He said the most egregious example was the need to build a £100mn bat shed over the railway to protect a rare species from being hit by passing trains alongside woodland in Buckinghamshire. 

“I could give you loads of those examples. That’s my favourite one, because it involves this bat . . . and people then have this simplistic way of saying: ‘Oh, you’ve gone over the budget.’ Well, yeah, OK but do people think about the bat?”, Thompson told an industry conference in November. 

HS2 has been plagued by delays and cost overruns since it was given the go-ahead by ministers more than a decade ago, with management blaming issues including cost-plus contracts, an increase in tunnelling and complications with ground conditions. 

The price tag for the line between London and northern England was put at £33bn when approved in 2012.