HS2 paid consultancies £65mn last year in run-up to project ‘reset’
Higher spending likely to raise questions about taxpayer-funded body’s approach to long-delayed railway
The taxpayer-funded body in charge of the High Speed 2 railway line paid consultants £65mn in 2025 as it sought advice on a “reset” of the controversial £103bn project that will take at least 15 more years to build.
The sharp rise in expenditure is likely to raise concerns about HS2 Ltd’s approach, after transport secretary Heidi Alexander said delays and cost overruns on the line had become “a symbol of this country’s decline”.
PwC and Deloitte were paid £26.7mn and £23.1mn respectively for advice in the 11 months to November last year, according to data from Tussell, which monitors government contracts. Boston Consulting Group, Bloom, E&Y and PA Consulting also received payments.
In total, HS2 Ltd spent £64.6mn on consultants’ advice on the reset and other issues in the period. Nichols Group was awarded a nine-month, £2mn deal to support Mark Wild, who joined as chief executive in late 2024.
The figure marks a sharp uptick in HS2’s spending on external consultants, which had previously been on a downwards trajectory. Consultancy spend dropped from £32mn in the year to March 2022 to just £14mn in the year to March 2025.
Tony Travers, infrastructure expert at the London School of Economics, said: “This further reliance on consultants is evidence that HS2’s in-house team still finds it hard to comprehend the project it is attempting to deliver.”
The reset, led by Wild, last week revealed the total cost of the new railway between Birmingham and Euston station in central London had risen from a previous estimate of about £80bn to up to £102.7bn.
Despite the project first being drawn up in 2010 and expected to be completed by 2026, Alexander told MPs the scheme would not be finalised until the 2040s.
Trains will run at 320km/h, down from the planned 360km/h, and passengers travelling to and from the Midlands and central London will have to change trains at Old Oak Common in the north of the capital.
The scheme — due to connect London to Leeds and Manchester in a Y-shaped route before it was slashed by the previous government — is the most expensive railway per mile of track in the world after lucrative contracts were handed to suppliers when designs were only at early stages.
A separate review by Sir Stephen Lovegrove, former national security adviser, this week criticised a “tactical reliance on consultants” by HS2, noting that consultants “do not take responsibility for advice given to ministers”.
In evidence to parliament in late 2024, Wild warned cost overrun problems were “rooted in the main civil works contracts” because they “intrinsically moved the risk to HS2 to manage”. But HS2 says it only started to try to renegotiate the contracts in March this year.
Two people familiar with the matter said total expenditure on consultancies ahead of the reset was closer to £100mn because the government had yet to report figures for the past six months.
PwC is the biggest winner of consultancy work overall at HS2, taking £69.8mn from 21 contracts since 2016 on work ranging from “commercial reset services” to “finance managed services”, according to Tussell.
Simon Kirby, CEO at HS2 between 2014 and 2016, later worked for Nichols, a move that prompted the then anti-corruption watchdog to call for fresh powers to vet former quango staff taking up private-sector roles. Kirby is now a special adviser on rail and other big projects at PwC.
Mark Thurston had been a consultant at Nichols before he served as boss of HS2 between 2017 and 2023.
The railway’s consultancy contracts are in addition to those held by the project managers such as Balfour Beatty, Ferrovial and Bouygues. Their business models rely on subcontracting out the majority of the work to specialist subcontractors, many of whom subcontract again.
Alexander said Wild — who earns between £660,000 and £665,000 a year, four times the salary of Sir Keir Starmer — had “an almost impossible job” but that the new leadership team was “turning things around”.
“HS2 Ltd is reviewing its supply chain contracts and the incentives within them to ensure we finish the job at the lowest reasonable cost. And it is managing those contractors properly to make sure supplier performance is up to scratch,” she added.
HS2 Ltd did not dispute that a large proportion of the £65mn was spent on advice on the reset and said: “Fundamentally resetting HS2 was the only way to regain control of the project . . . This is a hugely complex task, requiring a vast amount of external industry expertise.
“Any costs associated with the reset will ultimately pay for themselves through improved management and efficiencies,” it added.