British Steel’s director-general, Gareth Stace, called on the UK government to expedite the High Speed 2 rail link (HS2), in an interview with a national newspaper on Dec 29. The project will provide support to the country’s ailing steel industry. The construction of HS2 rail link is projected to consume 2mn mt of steel between 2020 to 2025, according to the government estimates.
Interestingly, this comment from the insolvent British Steel’s director-general comes as the company negotiates a rescue package with privately-owned Chinese longs steel producer, Jingye Group.
HS2 project links London, the Midlands, and the northwest. The proposed budget for the HS2 rail link project has shot up from £26bn in 2015 to 88bn in 2019, recently UK’s prime minister estimated the cost of the project to be ‘north of £100bn.’
In an open letter in another national newspaper, Professor Roderick Smith, an expert in railway engineering at Imperial College London and former chief scientific adviser at the Department for Transport (DfT), urged the UK’s prime minister to make sweeping changes and reduce the scale of the project to make it economically feasible.