When a bank flags a transaction as suspicious, it is not usually because someone has confessed to a crime. It is because the numbers do not make sense. A property sells for three times its market value. An invoice is paid at five times the going rate. Goods cross a border priced at multiples of what they would cost anywhere else in the world. HMRC lists over-invoicing as the first red flag in its own guidance on trade-based money laundering. The Financial Conduct Authority requires banks to report transactions where the value is “significantly above fair market value”. Evidence of this triggers an investigation.
Now, gentle Puffin, ask what those same authorities would say about Britain’s high-speed rail project, HS2. The Department for Transport’s own benchmarking study, drawn from comparable European projects, puts the fair market value for high-speed rail at roughly £32 million per kilometre. Spain built over 3,200 kilometres at £13 million per kilometre. France’s most expensive TGV line cost £16.9 million. Germany completed Berlin to Munich through difficult terrain at around £19 million.
HS2’s Phase 1 is projected to cost £275 million per kilometre. That is 8.6 times the European average. The full network was originally costed at £37.5 billion. Industry estimates have now passed £100 billion. Alon Levy, who maintains the largest international dataset of transit construction costs, has calculated that the total cost of every high-speed line ever opened in France and Germany combined is approximately equal to the cost of HS2 alone. A reasonable objection is that Britain’s planning regime is unusually expensive. It is. UK infrastructure costs roughly twice what the same projects cost in France, Germany, or Spain — a figure Britain Remade, BCG, and Infrastructure UK all converge on. Even if every pound of that premium were planning, HS2 would still cost four times the adjusted baseline. Planning regulations did not write the contracts, approve the spending, or sign the invoices. This following will identify who did.
What that money bought is a train between a suburban interchange in west London and the centre of Birmingham that will run roughly thirty minutes faster than the existing service. The journey can already be made in 1 hour and 20 minutes on a line that is neither slow nor neglected. The Leeds leg, the one that was supposed to “rebalance the country”, was cancelled in 2021. The Manchester leg was cancelled in 2023. The rationales the project had been sold on, connecting the North to the South, relieving pressure on existing lines, triggering regeneration, no longer apply to anything that will actually be built. That money did not come from nowhere. It came from the same tax base that funds every public service the country depends on. You would think that when a project fails this badly, wasting billions of public money, someone would have to answer. In reality, no one has, and no one will. The minister says he cannot direct an arm’s-length body like HS2. The board says it followed the governance framework. The chairman has moved on. The chief executive, once one of Britain’s highest-paid public servants at £676,000 per year, has also moved on, calling the job “the highlight of my career”.
Construction of Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport went 3.5x over budget. Germany fired multiple CEOs, convicted its technical director for corruption, and the city’s mayor resigned. Britain’s equivalent fired nobody and convicted nobody. HS2 is a useful place to start this story because it is too large to ignore. The numbers are so extreme that the machinery around them becomes visible. Once you can see that machinery in one project, you start to recognise it elsewhere. The first question is whether criminal fraud occurred inside the project. The Serious Fraud Office has received statements from former HS2 Ltd employees alleging exactly that. Fraud, bribery, document shredding, cost figures manipulated to ensure money kept flowing. Those allegations have not resulted in charges. The second question is larger. When a system produces the outcome of fraud, public money transferred to private beneficiaries at multiples of the market rate, with no accountability and no mechanism of recovery, should that be treated differently just because it was executed through governance structures rather than around them? The law treats them as entirely different things. That gap is maintained by a structure of arm’s-length bodies, revolving doors, and appointments by patronage, operated by a network of individuals that occupy both sides of the transaction. Britain ranks in the global top ten for low corruption on every serious international index. The following articles will posit they are measuring the wrong thing…………
© DJM 2026
