We welcome the news that the HS2 project has received a four-year funding settlement from the Government in this Spending Review, marking an important step forward in rebuilding confidence and certainty around Britain’s biggest infrastructure project.
This sort of funding agreement creates the platform from which HS2 and its suppliers can carry out the much needed ‘reset’ of the project and bring clarity on both anticipated costs and programme. With this certainty in place the supply chain will now work with HS2 Ltd to drive the productivity improvements the project needs and the Government reasonably demand.
Rightly, this Spending Review has focussed on the funding needed to get the Euston-Birmingham section of the project back on track. Alongside the reset of this element of the programme, we must now work to define what is needed between Birmingham-Crewe to avoid creating Britain’s biggest bottleneck in this section of the national railway.