North West
HS2 is already providing huge opportunities for people and businesses across the North West.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we have made the decision to postpone all of our public face-to-face engagement events and meetings for the safety of our staff, stakeholders and communities. We have also put in place alternative ways of communicating and engaging regularly with communities to ensure that we can continue to inform, listen and respond.
The HS2 Helpdesk remains operational all day, every day, and is your first point of contact: Freephone 08081 434 434; Minicom 08081 456 472; Email: [email protected]. If you contact us by post there will be an extended delay in us responding to you.
HS2 is already providing huge opportunities for people and businesses across the North West.
We’ve engaged with 414 businesses of which 91 have delivered work on HS2.
Involving businesses of all sizes *
* Excludes businesses who have not supplied company size data
In total, 500 people at WSP offices around the country are working on HS2, including 220 people on the Phase One stations with 39 different specialists on each station.
As part of WSP’s work on HS2, which is to lead the design development of two new HS2 stations – Birmingham Curzon Street and Old Oak Common, it has hired 25 new staff for its transport and infrastructure discipline and 115 new staff for its environmental discipline.
In Manchester, 40 employees including 5 apprentices and 5 graduates are working in Rail, and 44 people including 1 apprentice and 25 graduates are working in Land Services. Plus another 15 in Ecology, 12 in Town Planning and 12 in Ground Risk and Remediation.
WSP has also committed to taking on 12 new apprentices on Old Oak Common station and four on Curzon Street station. The company will also be working with schools along the route through the Class of Your Own charity which gets children into engineering, and is supporting National College for High Speed Rail.
Edward Joynson, apprentice in development infrastructure at WSP Manchester, aged 20, is already working as a junior technician on HS2 in Manchester. He said:
My dad was a builder, as a result I have always been interested in construction and wanted to learn about the way designs are created then constructed. Working on HS2 is very exciting as I know that I am contributing to a significant piece of national infrastructure that will benefit hundreds of thousands of people in the future.