HS2 could cost more than \u00a3100 billion and may not open until 2039, Britain’s Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has announced.<\/p>\n
The Cabinet minister told the Commons she was “angry” about the “obscene increase in time and costs”, which she blamed on “the failures of successive Conservative governments”.<\/p>\n
She said the expected cost of completing the high-speed railway was between \u00a387.7bn and \u00a3102.7bn (in 2025 prices).<\/p>\n
Constructing the line from London to Birmingham – plus the now abandoned onward legs to Leeds and Manchester – was initially estimated to cost \u00a332.7bn (in 2011 prices), but the budget has spiralled.<\/p>\n
The HS2 rail line was due to connect London and Manchester, but was severely curtailed by the last Conservative government.<\/p>\n
Services were planned to launch in 2026, but the new target schedule is between May 2036 and October 2039.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HS2 could cost more than \u00a3100 billion and may not open until 2039, Britain’s Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-457530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}