The eye-watering cost of HS2 has been laid bare by one mind-boggling statistic.
This week, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander gave an update on the much-maligned railway project.
She told MPs it could be as late as 2039 before the railway opens and trains start running from Birmingham to Old Oak Common, while trains from Euston station won’t start until 2040, 14 years later than scheduled.
It’s not just the delay that beggar’s belief, but the cost as well.
Alexander revealed that the total cost of the line could reach £102.7bn, telling the Commons that the project had become a “symbol of Britain’s decline.”
The delays and cost are despite the fact that HS2 has been massive scaled back in recent years, with initial plans for legs to Leeds and Manchester having been cancelled.
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This far down the line, the numbers can almost lose meaning as costs continue to spiral and the project’s completion feels further and further away.
But here’s a stat that brings the farce of the project all into cold, hard focus – it is likely to cost more than it did for NASA to send astronauts around the moon.
At the end of March, the Artemis programme was estimated to have cost $93bn. Adding on the cost of the actual launch and mission itself, around $4.1bn, this takes the total cost of Artemis II to an estimated $97bn.
Converted into sterling, this is just over £70m.
It was put pretty succinctly by political activist Philip Proudfoot, who wrote in a viral post on X: “It costs more to build a train from London to Birmingham (£102.7 bn) than for NASA to return to the moon.
“England is so broken.”