HS2 cover up.

Extract from today’s Sunday Times.

HS2: The secret files that expose a multibillion-pound cover-up
As the cost began to spiral, bosses allegedly shredded documents, sacked whistleblowers and used misleading projections to keep the scheme alive and the cash coming. The result was a ‘fraud against the British people’


ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES COWEN
Jonathan Calvert
,
George Arbuthnott
Saturday October 21 2023, 6.30pm, The Sunday Times
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The company in charge of constructing the HS2 railway has been accused of deliberately covering up its escalating costs to ensure politicians would keep spending billions of pounds of public money on the project.

Whistleblowers from HS2 Ltd have described how senior managers instructed staff to keep cost estimates artificially low. Each was sacked after trying to raise concerns.

They allege that for years parliament was not made aware of the true costs of the high-speed line when it voted on laws that approved the construction.

HS2’s internal fraud unit is now investigating allegations that the company deliberately covered up the cost overruns. The company denies wrongdoing.

The revelations have emerged in a three-month investigation by The Sunday Times, which has been given access to internal HS2 emails, files and cost calculations, as well as secret recordings of employees describing how cost figures were downplayed. HS2 insiders, former ministers and civil servants were interviewed as part of the investigation.

When an HS2 employee was spotted meeting a whistleblower for lunch, she was called in for two interrogations by the company’s internal investigators. Her phone was confiscated and she was pressed into handing over private messages from her personal social media account. A few months later she lost her job.

One of the whistleblowers, Stephen Cresswell, a former HS2 senior cost analyst, has made repeated attempts to alert the company’s fraud department, the National Audit Office and cabinet ministers. He alleges the company deployed a “classic playbook”, used on big publicly funded construction projects, of holding back real information on costs until after the Department for Transport (DfT) had given approval to start

If it is true it would not surprise me.When money is involved at any level people will try to get their hands on it.

especially this lot . wots up gaffer are you leaving a sinking ship ? .

Sadly, corruption would appear to be the norm.

I personally have never come across an organisation, public or private, that was free from corruption

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Financial Crime and Corruption.

Custom and practice, and lax accounting standards which are permissive of fraud.

click

I found more corruption in the NHS than anywhere else I have worked.

I particularly recall a conversation:

My boss had been refused some funding, he said pay for it from your slush fund. (He was American)

His boss: "I don't have a slush fund"!

My boss began listing a range of increasingly embarrassing counters to that assertion.

It did not take long for his boss to acquiesce: of course he could find the funds if he chose to so do!

PS for some reason, the link to the above ebook insists on going to a point which is not the beginning!

If you do choose to look at it, suggest you press page up when the link opens.

LINK

The jacks of all trades and masters of none always know better on how it should be done!

And its not just confined to HS2 where escalating costs are concerned, remember the building of the new Wembley Stadium, Crossrail and many other of the large projects for the benefit those living down south, especially around the London area.

'The elephant in the room': apparently time and again when such cost overruns are investigated, it turns out that all parties concerned were aware that initial estimates of cost were pitched unrealistically low, as some sort of 'come-on' and inevitably, subsequent more realistic costing would be higher.

If you adopt such an approach, then you must expect the rather inevitable results.

It's politics!

Went to a wedding in Brackley on Thursday. The amount of disruption due to HS2 is criminal. Taxi drivers are all going mad because the roads are gridlocked and they are losing wages? Also going into New St Station in Birmingham, the area covered by engineering work is huge!

Taxi drivers are alway's moaning no matter where you go and as for gridlock is it any worse than any town or city now as more and more cars appear on the roads?

Owd Codger:

"Taxi drivers are alway's moaning no matter where you go"

Especially if their passenger is an Owd Codger