A HS2 executive earning more than £235,000 a year submitted expense claims for London Tube fares costing as little as £5.40.
Emma Head, HS2‘s chief railway officer and one of the highest-paid officials in government, filed three separate claims in October and November 2024 for travel on the London Underground to attend external meetings. Two of the claims were for £5.40, with a third costing £8.50, the Sunday Telegraph reports. Her salary, which earned her a spot on the Cabinet Office‘s most recent list of “high earners” – falls between £235,000 and £240,000. Despite the small sums, the claims have drawn criticism with High Speed Two (HS2) coming under fire from MPs for its soaring costs, which are now estimated to reach £66 billion for a rail line between London and Birmingham.
The remaining sections of the line, planning to connect London with Manchester and Leeds, were scrapped by the previous Conservative government.
Newly released data from HS2 reveals other senior staff have also submitted claims under £10. Huw Edwards, the stations delivery director, who earns over £170,000 a year, claimed £4.36 for a dinner “while staying overnight in Birmingham on HS2 business”.
Greg Smith, a Conservative MP for Buckinghamshire – one of the constituencies most affected by HS2 construction – criticised the claims as tone-deaf given the project’s financial footprint and ongoing disruption.
He told The Telegraph: “Whilst HS2 spends billions trashing my constituency, my constituents will expect tight cost control from their executives and officials, which doesn’t seem to be the case. HS2 is a project that we can’t afford as a country, but this Government is ploughing on with regardless. Every day that goes by, the cost goes up by millions, if not billions.”
The true cost of HS2 remains unknown. HS2 Ltd continues to report its costs to the taxpayer in “2019 figures” which do not account for the significant inflation that has occured over the last six years.
When first proposed by the Labour government in the late 2000s, HS2 was expected to cost around £37.5 billion. Today, the reduced version of the project – delivering only a single stretch between London and Birmingham – could cost nearly twice that figure on its own.
In February, the chief executive of HS2, Mark Wild, defended the high-speed railway project, insisting it will “prove its worth”. His comments came in the wake of criticism from MPs who described HS2 as an example of “how not to run a major project”.
The Commons Public Accounts Committee warned the cost of building the railway between London and the West Midlands “might be close to £80bn”.
Mr Wild said: “HS2 will prove its worth” and insisted his ongoing “reset” of the programme will “break the cycle of this continuous drip-feed of bad news”. He added: “The project has got itself into some difficulty, so my job is to reset it, put it back on track. It is true, we did the same thing in Crossrail, which should give us a lot of hope and benefit going forward.”
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