15 Years Late and £100 billion over; HS2 and the Art of the Reset
The Art
15 Years Late and £100 billion over; HS2 and the Art of the Reset
The latest HS2 announcement in the British parliament isn't just another cost overrun story, although that story as well is very relevant. Read carefully, it's a live case study in what it actually takes to reset a major programme without cancelling it.
The Transport Secretary's statement to the British Parliament on 19 May confirmed what most observers already said many times over: HS2 will now cost between £87.7 billion and £102.7 billion in 2025 prices, with the first trains not expected to run before May 2036, and possibly as late as October 2039. The full scheme, including Euston, is now expected to open between 2040 and 2043.
These numbers will certainly dominate the headlines for the coming weeks and months. But they are not, on their own, the most interesting thing about today's announcement.
The more revealing detail sits deeper in the story. Two-thirds of the cost increase, the government acknowledged, came not from inflation or external events but from "necessary works that were missed from the scope of the original project plan, under-estimation and inefficient delivery.". In simple words, that’s just failure of epic proportions in front-end planning.
What HS2 is now undergoing is the most public attempt in British infrastructure history at something major programme practitioners increasingly recognise as an art form in its own right: the reset.
What a reset actually is
A reset is not a relaunch, a rebrand, or a polite word for cancellation. As Mark Wild said, ‘HS2 is at a point where cancelling it would cost as much as or more than completing it.’ A reset is a structured rebuilding of a programme's foundations while delivery continues on the ground. It typically involves four moves, in no fixed order, all of which are visible in HS2's current programme.
One is re-baselining. HS2 has spent £44.2 billion to date - pretty much its entire original budget. The civil engineering on the route is running at least four years behind schedule and testing and commissioning is underestimated by another three years. A reset begins by stating these figures honestly, even when they are politically uncomfortable. Past estimates, the government finally admits, have "proven clearly inaccurate." That admission makes possible everything that follows.
Another is scope simplification. The decision to align HS2's operating speed with proven European high-speed standards rather than certifying a railway at a speed never operated in the western world is a textbook example. When a programme is in trouble, the temptation is to defend every original specification. The discipline of the reset is to interrogate which features were ambitious and which were necessity — and to sunset the ones the programme can no longer afford to carry. This is where the rubber hits the road as they say.
Then there is organisational rewiring. HS2 Ltd is cutting ~300 corporate roles, redirecting ~170 roles into frontline delivery (a 40% uptick), and bringing in commercial and technical leadership identified as missing in the James Stewart Review. Resets fail when leadership tries to deliver a fundamentally different programme with the same structure that produced the original problem.
And there is governance reconstruction. A new Shareholder Board, a monthly Programme Performance Board, a Ministerial Task Force, and the new Mega Projects Decision Panel have replaced the prior decisions framework. The intent is fewer assurance layers, clearer accountability, and decisions made closer to the work.
In practice
Resets are often resisted because they look like an admission of failure. Au contraire, a reset is the moment a programme regains the capacity to tell the truth about itself. The cost of a delayed reset almost always exceeds the cost of an early one. HS2’s reset is happening at year fifteen of the programme. Much of the work now underway could, perhaps, have been initiated closer to year five, before delivery assumptions, governance structures, and organisational behaviours became so deeply embedded; which is precisely why programmes such as NEOM, recalibrating earlier in their lifecycle, may find the work less painful than HS2 has.
The harder question
The bet in the Transport Secretary’s announcement is that a programme this far gone can still be turned around without cancellation; and that the £44.2 billion already spent and the over 30,000 people on site represent enough sunk infrastructure and capability to justify finishing the job, even at twice the original cost and a decade later than promised.
That bet could likely prove correct. What is harder to answer is whether the art of the reset will be remembered for future programmes before they need one or whether it will only ever be applied when there is nothing else left to try as is the case with HS2.
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