{"id":3124,"date":"2019-02-18T09:26:34","date_gmt":"2019-02-18T09:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/?p=3124"},"modified":"2019-02-18T09:26:34","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T09:26:34","slug":"5-5bn-spent-on-hs2-before-any-construction-started","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/5-5bn-spent-on-hs2-before-any-construction-started\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a35.5bn spent on HS2 before any construction started"},"content":{"rendered":"

At least \u00a35.5bn was spent on HS2 before construction work even started.<\/p>\n

Figures published in Parliament last week confirm \u00a35.5bn of the \u00a356bn budget was spent between 2009 and April 2018.<\/p>\n

The money has been spent on the purchase of land and property, design, legal fees, consultants, staffing and other overheads before any main construction work started on site.<\/p>\n

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Further financial details revealed that HS2 spent \u00a35.7m on 89 agency staff during the six months to December 2018 at an average annual salary of \u00a3128,000.<\/p>\n

Doubts have been raised over the future of the project due to fears over escalating costs.<\/p>\n

But rail minister Andrew Jones said: \u201cAlready there are 7,000 jobs supported by the programme; already over 2,000 businesses have HS2 contracts; and already the diggers are on the ground in Birmingham. Building has started.<\/p>\n

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\u201cAnd in case you have seen any recent newspaper stories claiming that the northern stages of HS2 might not be built \u2013 they are complete nonsense.<\/p>\n

\u201cHS2 was conceived, developed and is now being delivered as a national railway \u2013 but in particular to improve links for the north and midlands.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo our commitment to HS2, the full network to Manchester and Leeds, remains undiminished.”<\/p>\n

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from Construction Enquirer http:\/\/bit.ly\/2TViLVY<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At least \u00a35.5bn was spent on HS2 before construction work even started. Figures published in Parliament last week confirm \u00a35.5bn of the \u00a356bn budget was spent between 2009 and April 2018. The money has been spent on the purchase of land and property, design, legal fees, consultants, staffing and other overheads before any main construction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":149,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-3124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-construction-enquirer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3125,"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124\/revisions\/3125"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cita.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}