Lord Redwood
Main Page: Lord Redwood (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Redwood's debates with the Department for Transport
(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I should say from this Dispatch Box that the Government, too, are immensely saddened by the events in Bedford last Friday. Our sympathies are wholly with the relatives of the deceased driver and all those affected by the accident. The Secretary of State for Transport will be making a Statement later in the other place.
In respect of the spend on consultants, the spend in the 2025-26 financial year is for a fundamentally different purpose than any money previously spent on consultancy for HS2. The company was not in control of the contracts it had let or of what work had been done. The effort to find out what work had been done for the money that has been spent—roughly two-thirds of the original budget has been spent and only one-third of the work has been done—is testimony to the way in which the project was managed. Getting control of it means finding out what was done, and that is what this money has been spent on.
Lord Redwood (Con)
When will we have a realistic timetable and budget to complete the works on this much-delayed railway line?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The recent Statement by the Secretary of State for Transport in the other place said that the project—with Mark Wild as the new chief executive and Mike Brown as the new chair of the new board—is now expected to cost between £87.7 billion and £102.7 billion. The first trains are now expected to run between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street sometime between May 2036 and October 2039, and the full scheme, including Euston Station and the connection to the west coast main line at Handsacre Junction, is expected to open between May 2040 and December 2043.