Now Labour refuses to guarantee HS2 to Manchester after Conservative government wobble

The prospects of HS2 reaching Manchester appear to be getting thinner. Following a week which saw the Conservative government fail to guarantee the planned high-speed railway will reach the city, now a senior Labour figure has questioned the current plans.

HS2 has been in the pipeline for so long that it was Labour who were in government when work began on the project in 2009, a year before they left power. By 2012, lawmakers were settled on a Y-shaped route, taking passengers from London to Birmingham before the route split in two - with one line to Manchester and another to Leeds.

But amid spiralling costs, plans for the Yorkshire leg were ditched in November 2021, and now Manchester could face the same fate. Downing Street refused to guarantee its commitment to HS2 reaching Manchester on Thursday (September 14).

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And in an appearance on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg this morning, Pat McFadden declined to commit to the railway line being built in full. The shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said: "We want to see the railway being built, it looks as though the government is now putting a question mark over this, there may be revised costs to that.

"When this started, a price tag of about £30 billion was put on it. Those prices haven’t been raised since 2019 - we’ve had quite a lot of inflation since then.

"So, I want to see what happens in the coming months, we want to see the railway being built but we’ve also - like everything else - got to look at the cost of everything we do.” Asked to