The British Government warned this Sunday against the exorbitant costs of the HS2 high-speed line project and called for restraint in spending, amid fears of a new reduction in this important project.
Destined to bring the large cities of the north of England closer to London, the country’s second high-speed line – after the one that connects the capital with the Eurotunnel – cannot benefit from a “blank check” if its cost increases “inexorably” , according to Defense. Minister Grant Shapps warned on Sunday. Estimated at £37.5 billion in 2013, HS2 has seen its cost soar to around one hundred billion (€115 billion).
The project, which has already been revised downwards several times to try to maintain costs, is at risk of suffering cuts in the Birmingham/Manchester section, according to the British press. “I have to say it would be irresponsible to just spend the money, to act as if nothing had changed,” Grant Shapps, formerly head of transport, told the BBC’s Sunday Politics Show, referring to the rising costs of the project, especially due to the inflation linked to war in Ukraine.
Big projects like HS2, “which I think is the biggest construction site in Europe, absorb a lot of that money,” he continued, “any government has to make these decisions.”
“Second class citizens”
In the United Kingdom, the issue is very sensitive, because the reduction of HS2 ambitions is denounced as a failure to fulfill the government’s promises in its territorial rebalancing policy to benefit the disadvantaged regions of the north of England. And this a few months before elections to which the conservatives, in power for 13 years, are approaching with a disadvantage of about twenty points in the opinion polls over the opposition.
On the Sky News channel, the Labor mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, estimated that residents of the north of England are treated like “second-class citizens.” If the Conservatives “leave a situation where the southern half of the country is connected by high-speed lines and the north of England remains on Victorian infrastructure,” he added, “that is a recipe for the north-south divide to become a north-south division. southern abyss for the rest of the century.”
Source: BFM TV
