Rishi Sunak axed the HS2 project from Birmingham to Manchester and promised to use the £36 billion of savings to fund hundreds of other transport schemes.The Prime Minister told his party’s conference, taking place in Manchester, the HS2 project’s costs had “more than doubled”.He said: “I say to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed.“And the right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction.”
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00:00 HS2 is the ultimate example of the old consensus.
00:06 The result is a project whose costs have more than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed,
00:13 and it is not scheduled to reach here in Manchester for almost two decades, and for which the
00:19 economic case has massively been weakened with the changes to business travel post-Covid.
00:26 I say to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed, and the
00:32 right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction.
00:51 And so I am ending this long-running saga.
00:55 I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project.
01:02 And in its place, we will reinvest every single penny, £36 billion, in hundreds of new transport
01:14 projects in the North and the Midlands, across the country.
01:17 This means £36 billion of investment in the projects that will make a real difference
01:23 across our nation.
01:26 (audience applauding)