Higgins prepares team as HS2 bill committee takes seats

The House of Commons HS2 Bill Committee of six MPs took their seats this week to prepare ground ahead of the task of hearing what could well be up to 2000 petitions from impacted parties along the 225km phase 1 route between London and Birmingham.

Antony Oliver
14 May 2014

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Despite having secured a resounding 452 to 41 vote of confidence in Parliament last week to approve the bill’s second reading, High Speed 2 chairman Sir David Higgins is certainly not sitting back.

“Losing momentum is the single biggest thing’” he explains accepting that Royal Assent is unlikely before 2016. “Projects like this need to keep having events and wins so that the public and politicians can see progress. If it loses and stalls then it will be hard to restart.”

“We can’t be in direct discussion with the committee but we need to respond to the petitions and advise the committee what the implications are of each petition,”

Sir David Higgins

The fear is that if the legislative process takes the three years that Crossrail Bill took, then, he says, “all bets are off”. Locals have until 23 May to lodge petitions with Parliament and should the committee say yes to every change they are asked for over the next few years ,then the HS2 will have to be well organised to be ready to assess the likely cost and impact.

“We can’t be in direct discussion with the committee but we need to respond to the petitions and advise the committee what the implications are of each petition,” he says. “We need to be efficient.”

HS2 now has around 600 people working on the project, including many agency staff. Right now the challenge – and Higgin’s number one issues to tackle – is the need to employ more senior staff.

“Today, right now the big thing is people,” he says. “Getting the right people and the right culture in the organisation is the biggest single issue - convincing the government and Treasury that we are responsible enough to be given more flexibility.”

That means recruiting the key roles in the next few weeks to secure the level of staff to work under incoming chief executive Simon Kirby and fill out the project’s capability.”

The reality is that the HS2 project is rapidly outgrowing its Victoria headquarters. It does have a small Birmingham office but the plan, in line with the desire for the project to benefit the regions, is to move the entire design and management function outside the capital very soon.

“The key date for me is start of construction in 2017 – that is the absolute crunch date,”

Sir David Higgins

“We haven’t said [where we will move to] yet but in the short term we will be taking space in Canary Wharf, taking over the back end of a lease vacated by the Financial Service Authority,” says Higgins. “After that we will move somewhere else but we haven’t said where yet.”

What is clear is that as the project moves towards reality it is fast becoming a destination for designers and engineers from Crossrail and other major infrastructure projects.

“It would be bizarre to build the next big rail infrastructure project in the UK that doesn’t have anybody that worked on previously successful projects or companies,” he says. “You learn from other projects. You beg and steal ideas as we shamelessly did that at the Olympics. You take ideas a bit further and pass them on. We will do that with Crossrail. They have set whole new standards which we should pick up improve and pass on.”

So having lived through the pressure of delivering the fixed deadline of a high profile project like the 2012 London Olympics little, it seems, keeps Higgins awake at night about a mere high speed railway?

“The key date for me is start of construction in 2017 – that is the absolute crunch date,” he says accepting it doesn’t perhaps have the drama of a Danny Boyle opening ceremony. “It’s about momentum and getting started. Momentum will build once you get the project up and running.”

A full interview with Sir David Higgins will be carried in next week’s launch issue if Infrastructure Intelligence – available digitally and as a paper copy.