L

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 22 June 2026

Debate

HS2 Ltd: Consultants

Contribution

I should say from this Dispatch Box that the Government, too, are immensely saddened by the events in Bedford last Friday. Our sympathies are wholly with the relatives of the deceased driver and all those affected by the accident. The Secretary of State for Transport will be making a Statement later in the other place. In respect of the spend on consultants, the spend in the 2025-26 financial year is for a fundamentally different purpose than any money previously spent on consultancy for HS2. The company was not in control of the contracts it had let or of what work had been done. The effort to find out what work had been done for the money that has been spent—roughly two-thirds of the original budget has been spent and only one-third of the work has been done—is testimony to the way in which the project was managed. Getting control of it means finding out what was done, and that is what this money has been spent on.

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