SCOTTISH taxpayers will have contributed billions of pounds to HS2 so should not be treated as an “afterthought”, the SNP have said.
Last week, the UK Government admitted the flagship infrastructure project had been “no less than a litany of failure”.
The Labour administration blamed the previous Tory government for the overruns.
The link to Scotland for the project was cancelled in June 2022, with the route from Birmingham to Manchester scrapped by former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak in 2024.
Now, the scheme is running £37 billion over budget, and has been delayed beyond 2033.
The UK’s Secretary of State for Transport, MP Heidi Alexander, told the House of Commons last week: “I’m drawing a line in the sand – calling time on years of mismanagement, flawed reporting and ineffective oversight.
“It means this government will get the job done between Birmingham and London.
“We won’t reinstate cancelled sections we can’t afford.”
Alexander (above) also admitted there was “no reasonable way to deliver” on the 2033 target for the first trains to run between London and Birmingham.
The SNP are now urging the UK Government to look again at extending the line to Scotland, after taxpayers north of the border will have contributed to the project but see no benefit.
Willie Coffey, SNP MSP, said: “The fact the UK cannot construct a high-speed rail network - the norm in many countries around the world - speaks for itself.
“While we know HS2 won’t have any stations in Scotland, with the way things are going it’ll be lucky to have any stations in England either.”
Coffey pointed to claims made during the 2014 independence referendum that a Yes vote would jeopardise Scotland’s opportunity to benefit from HS2 “only to find that promptly after the referendum the connections to Scotland were ditched”.
“This is nothing new sadly, 30 years ago we were promised that Scotland would be connected to the Eurostar - but that was dumped despite Scotland's sizeable contribution to paying for the creation of the Channel Tunnel,” he added.
"Promises broken and public money squandered is par for the course for Westminster. It’s clear we need to get Scotland's finances and transport investment out of the hands of Westminster and into Scotland's hands with independence."
It comes after new HS2 Ltd chief executive Mark Wild said the “overall situation with respect to cost, schedule and scope is unsustainable” in a letter to Alexander.
He said costs would continue to rise if ministers did not renegotiate engineering contracts awarded in 2020.
Wild also said that the testing phase alone would be likely to take three years, rather than the 14 months that had been previously assumed.
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “As the Transport Secretary has made clear, after years of mismanagement, flawed reporting and ineffective oversight, our priority is to deliver HS2 between Birmingham and London at the lowest reasonable cost.
“While the new infrastructure is being built between London and the West Midlands, HS2 services will join the West Coast Main Line through a junction north of Birmingham and continue to Scotland, providing faster services to passengers.”
The £3bn Scottish link to HS2 was quietly dropped by the then-Tory government just 30 minutes before the result of a no-confidence vote on Boris Johnson was announced.
When Sunak cancelled the Manchester leg at the 2023 Tory party conference, he said the money would be diverted to other public transport projects and roads in the North of England and the Midlands.
