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Allowing staff to work from home has damaged the progress of the UK’s major infrastructure projects including HS2, a Government tsar has warned.
Hybrid working, which has risen in popularity after many offices were closed in response to the Covid pandemic, has made it more difficult for teams to collaborate and complete work, the head of the Government’s infrastructure body Nick Smallwood told MPs.
This has led to delays of 12 months in some cases and increased project costs, said the chief executive of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA).
Speaking in front of the Treasury Select Committee, Mr Smallwood claimed that working from home had been one of the key causes of delays on the HS2 project.
“I’ve seen a significant extension of design duration on projects as a result of hybrid working,” said Mr Smallwood, who runs the leading authority which monitors Government projects and officially rates their progress via a traffic light system.
“So, where you had designers in one office all working collaboratively together the durations were pretty normal. What we’ve seen post-pandemic is a nine to 12 month extension of those durations: that translates into cost and delay.”
When pressed by the Treasury Select Committee chair, Harriett Baldwin, on the impact of working from home on HS2, Mr Smallwood said designs were being completed at a much slower rate.
“Designers working from home… it’s slowing down all infrastructure projects.”
He added: “They’re all impacted in the design phase if those designers don’t work directly in the office.”
Projects can be delayed for a number of reasons including issues in the build stage, planning delays, legal challenges or budgetary constraints.
According to the IPA’s latest annual report, delayed projects include the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s new nuclear waste disposal facility scheme, the low carbon Home Upgrade Scheme and the Department for Transport’s A417 project. It is unclear why these projects were delayed.
Mr Smallwood said he and the IPA had not been consulted by the Government on the scrapping of HS2.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak opted to scrap the northern leg of HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester over cost concerns earlier this year.
Mr Smallwood said it would take at least 18 months to turnaround phase 1 of HS2, which consists of the London to Birmingham leg, which the IPA gave a red rating at the end of 2022 due to delays on the design work, inflationary pressures on the project and an underestimation of the scale of the task at hand.
Speaking at the same committee session, Stephen Dance, head of infrastructure at the IPA, added of HS2: “We were concerned that both the cost and programme were no longer going to deliver the outputs that [had been promised].”
Other reasons for the HS2 underperformance cited by Mr Dance were that detailed designs of some stages of phase 1 still had not been completed when construction began.
i has contacted the Government for comment.