The construction of a high-speed railway linking the major cities of the north of England with London has resulted in costs escalating over the past decade. The project, which has already been revised downwards, could be shortened by a new section.
The British government warned this Sunday about the exorbitant costs of the HS2 high-speed rail project and called for restraint in spending, fearing further cuts to this major project.
The country’s second high-speed line, designed to bring northern England’s major cities closer to London – after the one linking the capital to the Channel Tunnel – cannot benefit from a “blank cheque” if its costs rise “inexorably”, according to Defense Minister Grant Shapps warned on Sunday. The cost of HS2 was estimated at £37.5 billion in 2013 and has since risen to around a hundred billion (€115 billion).
The project has already been revised downwards several times to maintain costs. According to the British press, there is now a risk that the Birmingham/Manchester section will be cut. “I have to say it would be irresponsible to just spend the money and pretend nothing has changed,” Grant Shapps, previously in charge of transport, told the BBC’s Sunday Politics Show, citing the rise in project costs , especially due to the increased project costs to inflation related to the war in Ukraine.
Huge projects like HS2, “which I think is the biggest construction site in Europe, are eating up a lot of this money,” he continued, “every government has to make these decisions.”
“Second class citizen”
In the UK, the issue is extremely sensitive, with the reduction of HS2’s ambitions being denounced as a rejection of the government’s promises under its territorial realignment policy for disadvantaged regions in the north of England. And this is just a few months before the elections, in which the Conservatives, who have been in power for 13 years, are approaching the elections around twenty points behind the opposition in the opinion polls.
Speaking on Sky News, Labor Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham estimated that residents of northern England were being treated as “second class citizens”. If the Conservatives leave “a situation where the southern half of the country is connected by high-speed rail and the north of England is left with Victorian infrastructure,” he added, “that is a recipe for the north-south divide to become one North-south divide will become southern ravine for the rest of the century.”