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Britain’s High Speed 2 rail line spent £100mn building an arch over the railway to protect overflying bats from hitting its trains, the chair of the beleaguered project has revealed.
Sir Jon Thompson said the “bat mitigation project” was just one example of the planning issues that contributed to HS2’s spiralling price tag. The last Conservative government scrapped half of the rail line to save costs.
Thompson said at a conference on Wednesday that the current Labour government had “frozen” the wind-down of the cancelled northern leg of the project as it considered other options to improve rail capacity.
HS2’s enormous cost has been a running political headache for the UK government. Thompson has estimated the project will cost £67bn even in its reduced form running between London and Birmingham.
He told the Railway Industry Association’s annual conference that the project had gone far over budget in part because of issues such as the bat tunnel.
The publicly owned company constructing HS2 built a 1km steel mesh structure alongside woodland in Buckinghamshire following an instruction from Natural England to protect the Bechstein’s bat, Thompson said.
The 13 gramme bat is one of the UK’s rarest mammals, whose population numbers have suffered an extensive decline because of habitat destruction, according to the Bat Conservation Trust.
“I could give you loads of those examples,” Thompson said. “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, who became chair in 2023, said the bat measure was just one of 8,276 consents HS2 needed from other public bodies to build the first phase of the rail link between London and Birmingham.
The Labour government has launched a major review that could lead to the government taking more direct control of HS2 Ltd, the government-owned business responsible for the project.
The review comes after former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak last year decided to scrap the second half of the rail line from Birmingham to Manchester.
“We’ve got a plan to close down phase 2 [the Manchester link], but at the minute, the government has frozen all work,” said Thompson
“We haven’t sold any of the land. We haven’t reversed any of the early works we’ve done. We’re waiting on a decision about what the government wants to do, while it looks at its options,” he added.
Labour’s review will investigate the oversight of major transport schemes including HS2, with a focus on “the effectiveness of forecasting and reporting of cost, schedule and benefits, as well as actions to deliver cost efficiencies”.
The Labour government is considering how to improve connectivity north of Birmingham, with the existing West Coast mainline close to capacity.
Ministers are expected to launch a feasibility study in the coming months for a new rail route that would follow a similar path to the old HS2 northern leg but with slower trains.
Thompson admitted that HS2 Ltd “just weren’t fit for purpose” last year when the second phase of the project running from Birmingham to Manchester was cancelled by Rishi Sunak.
This week he argued HS2 could have built a far cheaper railway if the project had been fully designed before contracts for its construction were agreed, and if it had been designed to European high-speed specifications.
HS2 said the cost of the bat protection structure was driven by ground conditions, high standards mandated by Natural England and the government insisting on room for a future conventional railway alongside the high speed tracks.
Measures to protect the bats were specified by parliament, HS2 added.
Other construction projects have been hit by higher costs due to the need to protect threatened species in the UK.
Liz Truss, the former Tory prime minister, railed against the expenditure of public money on “bat bridges” to help protect the airborne mammal that had raised the cost of an expansion of the A11 on Norfolk.
Stephen Schwarzman, the boss of Blackstone, recently told UK chancellor Rachel Reeves that work at his £80mn country estate in Wiltshire had been disrupted by the need to provide detailed “habitat mitigation and enhancement” measures in case there are great crested newts on the site.