She added: The controversial high speed rail link doesn't need to go to Manchester as she demands more targeted transport investment. She said she is pleased that Rishi Sunak is going to scale back the colossal project to spare taxpayers money. ''S spiralling costs, because what might have been feasible at £3 billion really is not at £120 billion going northwards,'' Tatton MP in Cheshire said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 's the right thing to do and yes, stop it as soon as possible,' she said.
Sunak did nothing to quell fears on Monday that he is going to scale back the project, which may now terminate in a west London suburb rather than Euston, near the centre. William Hague, former Conservative leader, said HS2 has been 'terribly badly managed' and is a 'national disgrace'. Now that so much has been built he said there is a 'genuine dilemma' over whether it should go ahead to at least complete and make sense of the parts that we can still do'. Tory former chancellor George Osborne and ex-conservative deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine, among others, warned that scraping the Manchester route would be a 'gross act of vandalism' which would mean 'abandoning' the North and Midlands. Lord Hammond, another ex-chancellor, said: The project risked becoming a white elephant if not finished, while former transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said scaling it back would be 'completely wrong'.
The spokesman for transport minister Mark Harper said he is unhappy about a possible scaling back of the number of trains that he is working on is 'completely untrue'. Sunak may be back to saying a decision until the autumn statement in November. Some have been worried that details coming this week would cast a shadow over the Conservative Party conference, which will start on Sunday in Manchester. There has been indications that he could announce a string of regional transport improvements in an effort to limit the political fallout, including bringing forward Northern Powerhouse Rail between Manchester and Leeds. Downing Street said there is precedent to delaying aspects of the high-speed rail programme due to 'affordability pressures', pointing towards high inflation. Mr Burnham said that Sunak should not curtail the project and argued it would be a decision of epic proportions for our part of the world.
The new US owners of Birmingham City Football Club have joined a chorus of political and business criticism, warning that limiting HS2 would damage confidence in Government promises to deliver long-term plans. The club's chairman, Tom Wagner, wrote the Financial Times to warn that the move would hurt Birmingham's economy and result in a loss of investor trust, according to the Financial Times. In October, the government said it had calculated the cost of the Manchester leg to be up to £71 billion. Ministers said in June that £22.5bn had been spent so far on the first leg to Birmingham, while around £2.3bn had been spent on the second leg, with expenditure going towards labour as well as land. All those figures were based only on 2019 prices, so they will have soared thanks to inflation alone, as the costs of materials and wages rose.