After Ed Balls threatened to withdraw Labour’s support for High Speed 2 and suggested that the £42.6bn allocated to the project could potentially be better spent elsewhere, I spoke to Andrew Adonis, the former transport secretary and the architect of HS2, at a New Statesman fringe event last night to get his response.
In his first reported comments since Balls’s speech, Adonis, who is the head of Labour’s growth review and shadow infrastructure minister, told me that the shadow chancellor had “raised the bar” for the project and that the “incompetent” coalition needed to demonstrate that it could “keep costs under control” if HS2 was to survive. He criticised the government’s failure to pass legislation more quickly and to manage the programme effectively: “all they’ve done since coming to office is add £10bn to it”.
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