The service has an official budget of between £53bn and £71bn excluding a possible future eastwards extension.
HS2 building work is ongoing across 350 sites, the Transport Secretary Mark Harper said last week. An estimated £20bn has already been spent, according to senior insiders, who added that halting the programme now could lead to another £10bn in wind-down and legal costs.
The introduction of driverless trains on the London Underground was at the heart of Boris Johnson’s plans to defeat militant trade union leaders during his time as the capital’s mayor.
In 2012 he vowed not to buy new Tube trains with drivers’ cabs and said drivers would be surplus to requirements on the network within a decade.
Mr Johnson’s successor, Sadiq Khan, has resisted plans for the automation of Tube services, despite some train drivers reportedly commanding salaries in excess of £100,000 a year including overtime and benefits.
Nevertheless, driverless train systems are employed on Crossrail, the £19bn line that opened in 2022 after four years of delays and runs east-west underneath London.
ATO is still being trialled on high-speed services. West Japan Railway announced plans to test the technology on its trains earlier this year.
The HS2 trains will cost £2bn and are expected to roll off the production line in 2027. The first passengers are due to be carried between 2029 and 2033.
Each train will be 200 metres long, with an option to couple two of them together, creating a service capable of carrying up to 1,100 passengers. They will travel at speeds of up to 225mph.
Prominent business leaders have called for HS2 to be axed in recent weeks. Lord Wolfson, the chief executive of Next and a Conservative party donor, said last month: “At a time when the government is desperately looking to seek for savings, HS2 has got to come under the microscope again, because it’s a vast amount of money, who knows how much it is going to cost.”
Jeremy Hosking, the multi-millionaire financier behind Marathon Asset Management, said: “It shouldn’t have got anywhere near this stage.”
However, HS2 supporters say that abandoning the scheme would not solve the Treasury’s immediate budgetary problems.
Mr Harper updated parliament on HS2’s progress last week. Phase one between London and Birmingham is likely to exceed its target cost of £40.3bn based upon its forecast of future spending, he said, although it is within its overall budget of £44.6bn including contingencies.
He added: “In September, the [Government] commissioned HS2 to develop and implement actions to bring projected costs back in line with the target cost.”
