Massive HS2 fraud...

I watched an interview on GB News with a chap called Andrew Bruce who is a chartered civil engineer and was employed by HS2 to buy properties along the route the line would take. He had a budget of £2.8 billion. He said the scheme involved buying 13,000 properties many of which were large country properties that were very expensive.

He said after a while it became obvious that the £2.8 billion budget was wildly optimistic and estimated £4.8 billion was more realistic. To get costs under control he was told to value one third of the properties at £0, he was also told to shred the findings of a multi million pound investigation into HS2 costs. (God knows how HS2 thought they were going to dig themselves out of it) 

Andrew Bruce became very disillusioned, just before he was about to give a verbal progress report to the Dept of Transport, he was escorted off site by HS2 security. A week later he was told he was dismissed, no reason was given. 

Belive me, the police will be forced to get involved in this. 

If the £billions that have been pumped into vanity project HS2 had been spent on upgrading Victorian rail infrastructure, we would have the best rail network in Europe. Sunak was right to scrap it, it should never have been started. However, as the weeks and months move on, I'm sure the pressure to expose large scale fraud will increase. 

The stretch of HS2 between London and Birmingham has cost £396 million per mile. The cost per mile in France for similar high speed rail is £46 million per mile.
We are being ripped off. There needs to be a public enquiry.

I saw that Andrew Bruce interview.

He said he had done the job before, as in he was hired for his experience in ‘negotiating’ compulsory purchase of properties and said it took him less than a week to determine the declared cost was well below, as in, was about half, the actual level of funding needed, and that he was required to sustain the lie in order that MP’s who at the time were yet to vote on the project, would not reject it on cost grounds.

I’m not sure what one could do now but it sure as hell sounded like fraud to me

No shit sherlock, how many MPs had their fingers in the pie?

Its always worth bearing i mind that people like Mr Bruce and Failing Grayling may have agendas of their own for talking to the media now. Was Mr Bruce for example sacked for being a whistleblower or for being useless at his job and wasting lots of money.  there were certainly stories many many years ago of land being bought up seemingly out of control by Hs2 miles off the intended route.

While  I think it is true that with hindsight we should not have started the HS2 project at least in its current form, that is not necessarily a reason to cancel it halfway through construction. What matters at that stage is the comparative economic benefits of continuing versus cancelling against the extra cost now of continuing versus cancelling.  None of us have those figures.

There will undoubtedly be an inquiry.  It is very much in Labour's interest to do so as it was a Tory government that ran the project, so highlighting any waste and incompetence would benefit Labour.  The question is whether the Tories attempt to limit the inquiry's scope by commissioning it and determining its terms of reference on their watch or whether they judge it better to seek to ignore it until after the next election.

Good point, and the Spanish can do it for €25 million per kilometre, (€40 million per mile) so perhaps we should ask them to do it. Budget £50 million and then the Tory's mates can pocket the rest.


www.elmundo.es/economia/2018/06/27/5b328f2c22601ded1d8b4602.html