The new government is trying to get a grip of HS2, with yet another reset. Kate challenges the new minister, Lord Hendy, on the project’s future and also considers the legacy of HS2. Will Britain ever attempt something like it again? And will its image transform again once trains are actually, finally running?

Presenter: Kate Lamble

The arrival of Rishi Sunak in Downing Street revived the hopes of those who wanted to see HS2 cancelled entirely. One leg - to Leeds - had already been chipped away. And on the eve of the Tory party conference in Manchester, Rishi Sunak was persuaded to announce that that city would not now get HS2 either, in the face of intense resistance from the mayors of both Birmingham and Manchester itself.

Presenter: Kate Lamble

After successfully defeating a number of fracking projects, a wave of hardened environmentalists join the anti-HS2 protest movement. Locking themselves to fences and ancient trees, civil disobedience arrived at the frontline of building sites. But injunctions and evictions clear the protest camps, and the added cost is a drop in HS2’s very large bucket. The bigger threat to HS2’s national image arrived in the unlikely form of a notorious environmental mitigation: the Sheephouse Wood Bat Mitigation Structure - or as it’s better known, the Bat Tunnel.

Presenter: Kate Lamble

Costs began to truly spiral out of control. In search of the culprit, Kate goes through the mess HS2 made of some its largest contracts. Much of HS2 was being built by massive consortiums of engineering firms. A short lived effort to unload the project’s risk to these firms saw costs continue to rise beyond the original estimates. And, as the price increased, politicians faced further pressure to curtail the project.

Presenter: Kate Lamble

Revelations about waste and delay have left HS2 in poor shape - and ripe, in the view of its political opponents, for cancellation. But, at the opportune moment, a new Prime Minister arrives. Boris Johnson saw HS2 as a cornerstone of his “levelling up” agenda, and gave it the green light to proceed even as the country wrestled with the emergency of a global pandemic.

As HS2 began the process of lining up land along its route for purchase, individuals within the team became deeply concerned. They feared that HS2 was wildly underestimating the eventual costs associated with acquiring the land, as well as the shortage of available specialists and the risks of unfairness to those forced to sell. And, they worried that HS2 was being too slow to reckon with the true price tag as it focused on getting political approval to move forward.

Presenter: Kate Lamble

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

To deal with the growing opposition, the government resolved to commit to HS2 by way of a hybrid bill, which would open up opportunities for local communities to object to the route. The original design became mired in hundreds of expensive mitigations, compromises and compensations. Cheaper above ground sections were replaced by costly tunnels. Cuttings and sound barriers began to line huge parts of the route. The project was progressing, but it would have to pay the piper before long.

As specific plans for HS2 were announced, protestors quickly sprang into action, forming campaigning groups and arguing for the line to be fundamentally re-thought. They saw HS2 as an industrial eyesore rammed through the heart of some of Britain’s most beautiful countryside. Communities all along the proposed line were staring down the barrel of massive disruption, from the compulsory purchase of family homes and farms, to the ruination of local ecosystems. A movement was forming, and beginning to define the project in the public eye.

Presenter: Kate Lamble

As the designs for HS2 took shape, the new team behind it set out to prove its value to Ministers and MPs. But as Kate hears, long term flaws were being baked into the project, with an economic justification that centred on outdated assumptions. And, as the designers sought to make the justification, they adjusted the design - making it more expensive. The focus on speed was exciting - but it also distracted from the line’s real purpose. The initial vision was becoming more muddled by the minute.

Kate meets Andrew McNaughton, the man who, in 2009, was given the task of sitting down with a blank piece of paper and designing a new high speed rail line. Ministers across the political aisle were aware of the desperate need for a capacity boost on the creaking West Coast Mainline; and looking for a jolt of optimism in the wake of the financial crash. It was the first new line north of London in over 70 years, and Andrew was venturing out into uncharted territory; he set out to design a futureproof, ambitious solution that would be the envy of the world.