September 2015 to Date: Senior Planner, High Speed 2 Ltd. – Consultant for AECOM

HS2 is a £52Bn capital investment project to construct a high speed railway from London to both Manchester and Leeds. The land required to deliver this scheme equates to the largest land take in the UKs history and amounts to a value of some £5Bn for Phase one (London to Birmingham). I was contacted by HS2 to take on the planning of the Land & Property portfolio because of my experience with land on Crossrail, the brief was that within 3 months I should have prepared a breakdown of the land take at asset level with budget costs for the preparation of a Programme wide baseline. I achieved this goal.

Since then I have been commissioned to prepare and grow a team of L&P planners who can plan, monitor and progress the land take using an in-house designed database to my design which will capture all the 90,000 individual compensation cases to do with acquiring the 11,400 parcels of land. The tool is under development and the team is in place, I expect this work to be completed in October, in good time for the commencement of land assembly in January 2017.