Rail infrastructure project signs three-year deal with tech supplier

An artist’s impression of an HS2 train   Credit: Crown Copyright/Open Government Licence v3.0

The HS2 project has signed a £10m-plus deal with a supplier to manage its IT infrastructure over the coming years.

Newly published commercial information reveals that HS2 entered into a three-year engagement a few days before Christmas. The contract – awarded to Japan-headquartered provider NTT Data – is intended to provide a “management partner” to oversee the IT infrastructure being used in the delivery of the new rail infrastructure project. 

The deal will run until December 2025, and is expected to be worth £10.7m to the tech firm.

Since work on the new rail links began in 2017, High Speed Two Limited – the government-funded company created to oversee project delivery – has spent tens of millions of pounds on contracts with a wide range of IT providers.

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Deals awarded in the last two years include a short-term £1.5m engagement with Deloitte to support a “data ingestion platform”; a £16m IT support contract awarded to Atos; and a £5.6m deal for ERP software from IBM.

NTT Data, meanwhile, has incumbent major contracts with a number of other government customers; during the last six months, the firm has won six-figure deals with the Insolvency Service, the Crown Commercial Service, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the Home Office, and the Crown Prosecution Service.

First conceived back in 2009 by the then Labour government, the £96bn HS2 project is scheduled to deliver a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham, and onto Crewe, by no later than 2033 – up to seven years beyond the initially scheduled opening date of 2026. Work to extend the new network from Crewe to Manchester has a deadline of 2045.