Just read the tweets. They seem to focus on build costs and suggest excessive specs and contingencies. Passing costs and liabilities to the private companies seems a take on public sector extravagance with other peoples’ money!
There is nothing to evaluate the benefits of HS2 . We have the time saving on journeys as one but really? That small a saving for that outlay? Who will use HS2 i stead of normal rail? A similarity with Concorde comes to mind.
Is the reduced projected cost of £85b any better than the £106b? No. There will be a lot of soundbite rhetoric around this and future economic benefits to justify it. It smacks of efforts to reduce the cost to something that can be argued as a positive. Meanwhile money for real world issues will be hard to find.
Should we have a referendum?
