HS2 spent more than £100m on foreign steel in a year

The government spent more than £100m on steel made outside the UK for the High Speed 2 (HS2) megaproject in the year to April 2024, data has revealed.

Figures published by the Department for Business and Trade last week showed that 63 purchases of steel were made to build the rapid rail link in that period.

Of these, 23 deals completely excluded UK steel, according to the figures.

At least 13 foreign countries made the material for HS2 in the 2023/24 financial year.

These included France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Luxembourg, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Turkey, the UAE and China also sent shipments to the construction of the London-to-Birmingham rail line.

The single largest deal done with a foreign steel supplier in the period was a £38m purchase of 26,360 tonnes of reinforcing bar from France.

A separate lot of 21,940 tonnes of steel plate, bought for £27.3m, simply had its origin listed as ‘EU’.

The total amount of solely foreign-made shipments for the project in the year was £107.7m. On top of this some purchases involved several countries including the UK and were listed without a breakdown.

Nine of the orders that excluded UK steel could have been partly fulfilled using domestic sources, according to the government spreadsheet. A further two could have been completely procured from this country.

Ministers last week updated procurement policy to require all departments and public bodies to consult UK Steel’s digital catalogue before making buying decisions. The government said this would “help in-scope organisations to understand what types of steel are manufactured in the UK and how UK steel products are specified”.

UK Steel said this represented “a major step forward in embedding resilience, sovereignty and economic value into procurement decisions”. The body added there was a “growing recognition that a strong domestic steel sector is vital to infrastructure, defence and energy security”.

HS2 Ltd said 57 per cent of steel used on the megaproject had been UK-sourced, up to when the latest data was recorded.

A spokesperson for the rapid rail link delivery body added: “HS2 has created thousands of jobs in the UK supply chain and has worked extensively with the British steel industry over the last decade to ensure that it is in the best position possible to compete for contracts.”

Meanwhile, a future pipeline document released alongside the 2023/24 data showed just £5.1m of steel purchases ahead for HS2, across two packages.

In contrast, Network Rail was expecting to spend up to £100m on up to 100,000 tonnes of the material for its track renewals and maintenance programme in 2025/26 alone. The infrastructure operator spent £75.1m on UK steel in 2023/24, with just one foreign deal registered, a £4.3m purchase of 4,156 tonnes of material from Austria.