George Osborne is not relinquishing his love for High Speed 2 anytime soon. On his welcome return to television this morning, Andrew Marr gave the Chancellor a grilling over the new line. Osborne in return defended the government’s position both on monetary and ideological grounds. With the most recent costings of £50 – 80 billion thrown around, the Chancellor added some clarity on how much he will authorise for construction of the new line:
‘We have set the budget for £42bn for the construction costs. That includes, by the way, a big contingency. As we demonstrated with the Olympic Games, we can deliver these big projects actually sometimes under budget. I think we have got a good budget, which has got a very big contingency in it, we’ve set a budget.’
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