Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policy on delivering High Speed Two in full of the proposed reduction in platforms from 11 to 10 at Euston Station.

As set out in Autumn 2020 and in March 2021 Parliamentary Report, development of the baseline scheme at Euston Station has identified a significant cost pressure. As this remains at the design stage, work is ongoing to develop an optimised design and delivery strategy for Euston Station, including consideration of opportunities, efficiencies and scope reductions to address identified cost pressures.

As part of this work, the Department and HS2 Ltd have, with the involvement of other partners, been investigating whether building the HS2 station in a single phase would speed up delivery and reduce the overall cost. This work is currently indicating that moving to a slightly smaller, simpler HS2 station at Euston would have some benefits in terms of terms of reducing costs and risks. This work will help inform the way forward, with a final decision expected in Spring 2021.

Initial HS2 Ltd analysis indicates that moving to a slightly smaller HS2 station at Euston maintains the station infrastructure capacity to run all of the services in the planned HS2 Phase 2b Train Service Specification. The future development of the final HS2 timetable, in due course, will have close regard to optimising resilience and capacity.