Recommendation 50

The Department reflected that a key lesson from the experience of HS2, and which needs to inform all the Department’s future infrastructure plans, is that the Department needs to be very clear when it sets out on a large project what it is there to achieve. Changing the scope significantly when a project is already underway has a financial cost to it and the Department told us that the escalation of costs seen with HS2 reflects an obvious lesson of “to have a plan and stick to it.”83