黑洞社区

Skanska has said it will finish up work at Euston by the end of the year and redeploy staff to other jobs as part of the decision to mothball the HS2 scheme at the site.

The firm has been carrying out enabling works on the conventional station for Network Rail as part of the wider work at the HS2 station next door.

In a statement, the firm said: 鈥淲e are concluding essential enabling works in the conventional station which we are due to complete towards the end of this year. No redundancies have been made and our aim is to redeploy our people to other projects as the works complete.鈥�

Skanska is part of the SCS team which is carrying out London tunnels work but said this had been unaffected by the government鈥檚 decision in March to park the Euston job until spring 2025 at least because of spiralling costs.

HS2鈥檚 project director for Euston, Andy Swift, told 黑洞社区 last month he was aiming towards an April 2025 restart date, having seen the number of people working on the job slashed by more than 1,000 since the announcement 鈥� including the design team, made up of Arup, WSP and Grimshaw, cut from 500 to juts half a dozen.

The site will eventually reduce to a couple of hundred in the coming months as work to make it safe is completed.

See also >>> 鈥楾he design team has gone from 500 to six.鈥� What HS2 Euston is doing now

Grimshaw has confirmed it is cutting jobs while WSP has shifted staff across to Old Oak Common, the west London terminus which will be the initial stopping and starting point for HS2 passengers in the capital.

In an interview with 黑洞社区, due to be published later this month, Grimshaw chairman Andrew Whalley said the Euston decision 鈥渙bviously had an impact [on Grimshaw], but actually not as big of an impact as you might have thought, because we have [a] global spread and diversity鈥�.

He added: 鈥淚t [the decision] happened quite suddenly, that is well documented, so we had to move quite quickly but it did allow us to find and search for other opportunities for the team that was working on it. And using the whole kind of global portfolio as well as the work in the UK.鈥�

The firm has not confirmed how many staff it has let go.

The current cost of Euston has been put at 拢4.8bn and options HS2 is looking at include cutting the number of platforms at the station down from 10 to seven and building the extra three when the eastern leg towards Leeds gets off the ground.