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Worth pointing out that £14.4b of that is earmarked as contingency. Actual 'budget' is more like £35b. And I believe (but would have to check) that includes spe

• Silhouette 13y ago
  But all of these figures are funny money, and usually subject to variation by at least a factor of 2 if you ask the critics, at least some of whom have valid points to make. The reality is that we don't know what a project like this is really going to cost, economically or otherwise, until we're at least a significant part of the way through implementing it. Whether that actually matters is a different question, because the realistic alternative isn't that nothing will happen instead and taxpayers will suddenly get a £1,000+ windfall, it's that a broadly similar amount of government funding will be used for other purposes. Many of the interesting questions in this debate are qualitative ones about which general areas should be funding priorities and what the overall national infrastructure strategy should be. And many of the interesting questions that are quantitative are about opportunity costs as much as what will/would be spent on one massive project.