In mid-June Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said building the HS2 rail line was marred by a “litany of failure” causing missed deadlines and ballooning costs, which rose by £37 billion. She based her judgement on an in-depth investigation of HS2, called the Stewart Review.

But if you watched the BBC report on this “appalling mess” — which means HS2 won’t be completed by 2033 — there is no mention of the firms actually building the railway. Their ghostly lack of presence gives the impression that somehow the huge cost overruns have happened without any of the companies that actually dig the ground or lay the rails being involved.

There is a reason for this: the government censored all mention of the HS2 companies from its own report.

If you do a word search for the companies involved — the largest being Britain’s Balfour Beatty, along with France’s Vinci — in the main text of the report, it comes up zero. The companies’ names only appear in an illustration at the end of the report.

This investigation into HS2 was prepared by James Stewart, a management consultant who worked for the Blair government as chief executive of its pro-PFI body, Partnerships UK. PFI was a scheme which wasted money by giving private corporations inflated long-term payments in return for building and running public services like hospitals or schools.

But even with his record, Stewart’s review does not exonerate the private corporations building HS2. Far from it. HS2 is managed by a government-owned company, called HS2 Ltd. But the actual building work is done by four consortiums made up of some of Britain’s leading civil engineering companies. These are referred to in the report as the “Main Works Civils Contracts,” or “MWCCs.”

The Stewart Review very directly says: “The failure of The Main Works Civils Contracts has been a persistent problem for the Programme.”

Stewart argues HS2 Ltd is to blame for failing to manage the “MWCC” consortia. But he also says the private sector “supply chain” has “to take its share of the responsibility as it has largely failed to deliver under the partnership agreements and contracts it signed up to.”

The big contractors are part of the failure. Why are the companies not named? Stewart actually wrote a whole chapter on the failure of “Main Works Civils Contracts,” Chapter 9. But if you turn to Chapter 9, all the words have been removed. They have been “redacted for commercial confidentiality.”

Any blame he gives to the companies has been hidden. We know from one of the appendices that the main text did refer to the actual companies building HS2, so late and so over-budget.

For the record, they are Balfour Beatty, Vinci, Eiffage, Keir, Ferrovial, BAM Nuttall, Skanska, Costain, Strabag, Bouygues, Robert McAlpine, and VolkerFitzpatrick. But any possible criticism has been hidden for “commercial confidentiality.” The names of the companies appear in one illustration, a map of the scheme, but there is no explanatory text.

This in turn meant the firms avoided all blame — or even any mention — in media coverage of the damning HS2 report. If the government hasn’t the courage to name the firms building this huge, over-budget, late railway, will they have the courage to try and stop them charging far too much to take far too long to complete HS2?