Cheryl Gillan – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Cheryl Gillan on 2016-10-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what the annual budget for communication and engagement has been for HS2 Ltd in each year since 2010.

Andrew Jones

As is necessary for a project of the nature and scale of HS2, communication and engagement activities are undertaken by teams throughout the HS2 Ltd organisation, supported by a central corporate affairs team. This wide range of engagement includes, for example, local information events for impacted residents to meet with engineers to discuss the proposals; awareness campaigns along the line of route to inform residents about the property compensation schemes and how they can access these; and mobile sound labs for communities near the route of Phase One to come and hear the likely noise levels from the operational railway.

As a result, it is not possible to provide annual budget figures as the amount of time spent on communication and engagement activity is not centrally tracked.