According to internal estimates, a planned delay to HS2 by ministers will cost taxpayers more than £360 million.
In March, ministers announced they were delaying by two years the construction of a high-speed section between Birmingham and Crewe in a bid to save money.
It’s the latest controversy to hit the high-speed rail project, which has been beset by delays and spiralling costs ever since being announced.
It’s been dogged by criticism over its finances. A budget of £55.7 billion for the entire project was set in 2015.
But the target cost has ballooned to up to £71 billion, excluding the eastern leg which was axed in 2021.
This would have taken trains from Birmingham to Leeds and pushed the project’s cost to potentially more than £100 billion.
The finished line will eventually link London with Birmingham and Manchester, but the latest delays mean high-speed trains won’t reach Manchester until at least 2040.
The Department for Transport said that large infrastructure projects had to be funded sustainably.
They said that over the next two years, spending would remain within the annual budgets and some targets of the projects would be re-phased to ensure they’re delivered in the most cost-effective way for taxpayers, as the government set out in Parliament in March.
However, the funds being used were funds that were supposed to go to our local authorities to fund the community, hence why everything has risen exponentially year after year.
Most people can’t afford train fares now and now this is being built to save 20 minutes to get to London, why? Any thoughts if anyone will be able to afford a ticket?
Seventy-one billion which instead could have gone to the NHS – what a complete waste of taxpayers’ money.
This is an astonishing waste of money for a vanity project when it could be used on something more useful, and we the taxpayer are paying for these vanity projects, and if the rail unions continue to strike, what’s the point of having an extremely costly rail line with no trains to run on them?
Our Government keep saying they’re short of money, but then they give us this unwanted white elephant railway and this should be stopped immediately.
And who’s responsible for these delays? And why does the taxpayer have to suffer the additional costs if the contractors are at fault?
Of course, they will use some cockamamie excuse or they’ll blame it on COVID or some other failure as the contractors and consultants cream off their slice of a bigger money cake.
However, they dare not stop the construction because if they do it will be political suicide, and it will also demonstrate that it was never that great to start off with.
They created a monster that no one dare talk of. However, someone from the media should do a freedom of information request so that we can conclude this debacle so that the money can then help British citizens instead in this land of ours.
Once again, it’s politicians frittering away taxpayers’ hard-earned money and acting like headless chickens, but then they can’t be trusted to do anything properly, but you guessed it, they’ll do their best to reward this failure as well.
This is the biggest white elephant in history – unnecessary, rather useless and definitely meaningless, and it was a major government project which is going to be late and way over budget, and this is a project which should never have seen the light of day, and it’s a black hole for taxpayer money.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 