Crossrail could be axed due to budget cuts
Crossrail could be axed due to budget cuts
Allister Hayman, Regen.net, 2 July 2009
Major transport projects including Crossrail and a possible new high speed rail line could be cut or delayed due to nearly £30 billion of cuts to the Government’s transport budget over the next ten years, according to press reports.
Quoting a leaked transport industry memo, The Guardian newspaper reports that the Department for Transport (DfT) faces a £28.9 billion spending gap over the next ten years due to planned cuts to capital expenditure plans.
According to the Guardian, the memo, produced after an industry seminar with permanent secretary to the DfT Robert Devereux, future growth in capital spending would be flat and would no longer include an annual increase of 1.25 per cent, which would limit the outlay on new projects to £7.4 billion per year.
According to the report, the memo shows that without the 1.25 per cent escalator, the DfT would have £28.9 billion less to spend than expected on new projects over the next ten years.
This would mean projects such as the £16 billion cross London Crossrail line and a possible new high speed rail route, which the Government is considering, could be delayed.
A DfT spokesman said the £28.9 billion figure was extrapolated from a spending forecast that was a “guideline” and not a set budget.
“The department’s capital expenditure over the next three years was announced in the Budget – in the longer term any future budgets will be defined in the next CSR period,” he said.
“These calculations in no way represent final budgets for the periods referred to and therefore it would be misleading to make assumptions about future spending based on them in isolation.”
