If I was writing policy, I'd be writing a commitment to that high-level plan and to break it into individual projects and build those, each designed to link to the future ones.
And then to fund the individual projects based on the financial and economic circumstances at the time. Also to safeguard them as soon as you have detailed designs, even if they might stay safeguarded for many years.
If I was writing policy, I'd be writing a commitment to that high-level plan and to break it into individual projects and build those, each designed to link to the future ones.
And then to fund the individual projects based on the financial and economic circumstances at the time. Also to safeguard them as soon as you have detailed designs, even if they might stay safeguarded for many years.
If cancelling London-Manchester meant cancelling Liverpool and Scotland as well, then it would be much harder for Sunak to announce a full cancellation. Announcing that he's not funding that phase at the moment is a different story. It would then be up to the Starmer government to say "OK, we're pulling this out of the deep freeze and building Birmingham-Manchester as well as the Manchester-Leeds section of the Liverpool-Hull line." Then a few years later they could go, "OK we're also reinstating Birmingham-Nottingham and we're having another look at the Nottingham-Leeds/York design". Then they could be lobbied by the Welsh and go "OK, we're doing Birmingham-Bristol-Cardiff instead of Nottingham-Leeds" and so on. At least everyone would be able to see that they were going to be got to eventually.
If I was writing policy, I'd be writing a commitment to that high-level plan and to break it into individual projects and build those, each designed to link to the future ones.
And then to fund the individual projects based on the financial and economic circumstances at the time. Also to safeguard them as soon as you have detailed designs, even if they might stay safeguarded for many years.
If cancelling London-Manchester meant cancelling Liverpool and Scotland as well, then it would be much harder for Sunak to announce a full cancellation. Announcing that he's not funding that phase at the moment is a different story. It would then be up to the Starmer government to say "OK, we're pulling this out of the deep freeze and building Birmingham-Manchester as well as the Manchester-Leeds section of the Liverpool-Hull line." Then a few years later they could go, "OK we're also reinstating Birmingham-Nottingham and we're having another look at the Nottingham-Leeds/York design". Then they could be lobbied by the Welsh and go "OK, we're doing Birmingham-Bristol-Cardiff instead of Nottingham-Leeds" and so on. At least everyone would be able to see that they were going to be got to eventually.