Town hall tries to get back £11m spent preparing for HS2

A town hall is still trying to claw back the money it spent on HS2 - after the government scrapped the northern leg of the scheme. Cheshire East spent £11m preparing for HS2 coming to Crewe.

Some £8.6m of that will now have to be written off if the government doesn't pay it back. It has derailed the council's finances and, without government reimbursement, that money has to come from Cheshire East's already low reserves.

The council has been slated by residents on social media for spending their cash on the aborted project, Cheshire Live reports. But deputy leader Craig Browne, who chairs the highways and transport committee, said the expenditure was necessary at the time to try and get the best deal for areas which would have been affected by the high speed rail scheme.

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Speaking at a meeting of the corporate policy committee, Coun Browne said: "We incurred those costs because we were required to as part of the petitioning process.

"We had to, as part of that petitioning process, gather an independent body of evidence to place before consultants, parliamentary select committee, HS2 etc. Without that body of evidence we would not have been successful, either the previous administration under phase 2a or the current administration under phase 2b, in gaining those really key mitigations in terms of highways, in terms of ecology, in terms of environmental mitigations that we were honour-bound to secure on behalf of the communities that would have been affected by HS2 had it been delivered."

He added: "That is why we incurred the £11m of cost and, yes, the government should, in my opinion, reimburse us for all of it."

Council leader Sam