Kate Lamble

speaker

202 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2021 last heard 27 May

Kate Lamble’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Does a fall in the UK's healthy life expectancy mean what you think it means? · 27 May 2026 podcast

They're really important.

Right.

So 2017, they get Royal Ascent and they sign the first contracts for the civil engineering, which is this really important work to clear the land, build all your bridges, all the basics you need to do.

But instead of saying, this is what I want you to build for this price, they start with the company's help drawing up the detailed design, drawing in every single support structure, every rivet, all of those engineering details.

And what people see happening is that they see companies gold plating, designing extra support structures where frankly, they might not be needed.

And the reason they think this happened is because companies knew that after that contract was signed, they'd have to take on the risk of any additional cost.

So if things ended up costing more than the initial calculation, they're the ones footing the lion's share of that bill.

So the best way to protect yourself is to make that first estimate

the bit HS2 are going to cover, as high as possible.

Yeah, so it's an effort to protect taxpayers, but within a year of contractors taking on this detailed design work, the forecasted prices were 83% above the government's target.

So they think, OK, we can't do this anymore.

We're going to renegotiate it.

What they do is when they renegotiate it, instead of the contractors being liable for any future cost increase, is that risk is going to be paid by the government.

Now, later chairs of HS2 described this reversal as extraordinary because the gold plated design is already done.

And now the government are taking on all the risk of inflation and the unforeseen.

And they signed these at the beginning of 2020.

And so as COVID runs its course and Russia attacks Ukraine, the price of raw materials and energy soars.

And in the three years after 2020, it's estimated these revised contracts increased the cost of HS2 by £6 billion.

It's certainly true that HS2 is expensive for what it is.

If you think about it, London to Birmingham is 140 miles.

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