FT称Old Oak Common站成本升至43亿英镑且合同仍待重谈，但未形成可交易公司催化

Can the UK’s newest rail station escape the problems of HS2?
At Old Oak Common, a semi-industrial area of west London known for its old rail depots, concrete platforms for the next generation of high-speed trains have already been built. But it will be at least another decade before passengers arrive.
With a curved glass roof the size of six football pitches due to be installed next year, activity is picking up on the 140-acre High Speed 2 station — the largest in the UK to be built from scratch — where more than 1,100 workers are labouring in scorching heat.
HS2 Ltd, the taxpayer-funded body in charge of the world’s most expensive railway per kilometre of track, is touting the project as an opportunity for local economic transformation, with 18,000 jobs and 22,000 homes by the time it opens in the late 2030s.
But if the scale of the work under way is immense, the station also provides a three-dimensional illustration of the problems with HS2: costs that are rising and uncertain; designs that are yet to be completed; and contracts that are expensive and yet to be renegotiated — all for a purpose that is as yet unclear.
“Old Oak Common is a living metaphor for the whole HS2 project, in that it has massive ongoing cost, significant delays and no real certainty as to how it will be used,” said Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics. “The government really needs to explain the line’s purpose, and what continuing to spend billions a year on it will achieve.”
Like a lot of HS2, much has yet to be revealed at taxpayer-funded Old Oak Common, including the cost.
The National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, this year said the estimated cost of the station had jumped from £2bn in 2020 to £4.3bn by September 2025 — excluding inflation — owing to “immature design, underestimated complexity, site constraints, and replanning”.
But the updated cost in 2026 prices will not be revealed until the autumn, when HS2 chief executive Mark Wild is due to reveal the second stage of his “reset”.
Another potential issue is that although most of the design work for Old Oak Common has been completed, plans for the public spaces surrounding the station — and therefore the cost — have not, even though initial groundwork started nearly seven years ago.
The station is project managed by a consortium of Balfour Beatty, Vinci and Systra. The three companies employ more than 25 contractors, each of which has layers of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors beneath them, adding to complexity and costs.
Roughly 1,000 of the workers on site are employed by contractors; HS2 Ltd’s own staff numbers just 100, including environmental and community-engagement officers.
At least six years after the need to renegotiate the contracts was identified, Wild is seeking to move away from deals agreed on a “cost-plus” basis, where contractors are paid a percentage of the total value of the work plus all costs.
The framework has resulted in almost continuous bids for more money from contractors involving lengthy talks and extra expense. Last week HS2 said it had renegotiated two “inefficient” civil engineering contracts on the rest of the line, but it is yet to agree changes to the terms at Old Oak Common.
The purpose of the station is also unclear. Old Oak Common’s role as a London terminus is only temporary, until the planned HS2 branch to Euston opens in the early 2040s.
The station will serve as the 42nd stop on the Elizabeth line — the real draw for property developers — as well as a stop for the existing West Coast main line from London to Manchester and Glasgow.
But ministers’ decision to slow the speed of HS2 trains, and the requirement to change trains until the early 2040s, has prompted scepticism that passengers will want to use the new service.
Already this summer, Avanti West Coast cut the number of services running between Euston, Birmingham and Manchester following a request by the Department for Transport to save costs.
The £7bn a year the DfT is spending on HS2 is also sapping money for other much-needed regional projects, such as a tram system for Leeds.
While Andy Burnham has not addressed HS2 since becoming prime minister, he did say in June he wanted to revive the cancelled link between Birmingham and Manchester.
But support has been lacking in the regions the railway is meant to boost: in March, 35 per cent of people in the Midlands told YouGov they were not in favour of HS2, versus 31 per cent who were supportive.
In a statement, HS2 said Old Oak Common would provide a “new major transport interchange, with access to over 100 destinations, while HS2 will enable there to be more capacity on the West Coast Main Line so there are more frequent and reliable regional and local services as well as more space for freight”.
The DfT said that after “years of mismanagement”, the government had “taken decisive action to reset HS2 and ensure the safe delivery of the line between Birmingham and London at the lowest reasonable cost”.