I was sacked for blowing the whistle on HS2 – it shows our political system is broken

Telegraph

4 hours ago

From early on, Stephen Cresswell thought High Speed 2's (HS2) predicted price tag was ' an absolute joke '. If he happened to be right, it wasn't funny. When Cresswell turned whistleblower to warn of the railway's soaring expense, it cost him his job and, for a time, his health.
A married father of two from Surrey, Cresswell, 53, is a risk management consultant who specialises in modelling and forecasting the price and schedule of infrastructure projects. In practice, this entails working as part of a team with engineers and others, to calculate the cost of a scheme based on the plans.
Risk and uncertainty must be factored in when doing the sums. That means pricing in variables, like what if the ground or weather conditions are worse than expected? What if productivity is lower?
With experience in risk roles dating back to 2002, Cresswell knew a thing or two about number-crunching. And he knew the numbers on HS2 simply did not look right.
Earlier this month at an employment tribunal in Croydon, south London, he won almost £320,000 in compensation from HS2 Ltd after he was removed from the rail project for raising concerns that its true cost would be significantly higher than bosses were admitting. The price was being 'actively misrepresented', he had warned repeatedly.
Sitting at a table in The Telegraph office, he talks of the toll his years-long battle to make the truth known has taken on him personally.
'Anger is the most prevalent feeling,' he says. 'All the time, you've got it on your mind.'
Yet he never considered dropping his case, feeling that he had to see it through. It was more than personal: he wanted the public to see what was really going on. And what was going on, he says, was a 'colossal waste of money', that serves as 'another example of a really broken political system.'
In the mid-2020s, HS2 has become something of a byword for political mismanagement. The biggest and costliest instance of a major infrastructure project turning from a Keynesian vision of progress to a fiasco, running wildly over budget and way behind schedule.
But Cresswell foresaw this long ago. In 2014, he worked on costings for the Higgins Review – a government-commissioned report on managing the price of the scheme. The official estimate back then for delivering Phase One – the stretch running from London to the West Midlands – was £21.4 billion.