Roads Minister Guy Opperman displays a shocking ignorance of basic accounting over HS2 cancellation claims - Yorkshire Post Letters

Re: HS2 axe a boon for rural transport, Guy Opperman, The Yorkshire Post, January 11.

For a Transport Minister, Guy Opperman shows a shocking ignorance of basic accounting with his dishonest claim that HS2 cancellation has released more money for local transport.

Even a trainee accountant can tell the difference between capital and revenue budgets but that seems to have escaped Mr Opperman.

Unfortunately the Parliamentary debate where he made his speech was characterised by various Conservative MPs making sycophantic remarks and mutual backslapping. There was no critical scrutiny of his remarks, perhaps because they were made late in the evening when most sensible MPs had left the Commons.

To explain what the Minister missed: HS2 was always funded by borrowing, like other large capital projects. That money is then paid back over many years.

The money supposedly released for local spending is largely revenue funding, that is money from current Government income raised through taxes. Not HS2 money at all.

Worse still, there appears to be double spending, with a pot of money promised to one area also promised to another. Not dissimilar to all those new hospitals Boris Johnson promised us I suppose.

Despite his bragging, bus services in both rural and most urban areas are considerably worse than when the Conservatives came to power with the Liberal Democrats in 2010.

The state of roads and pavements across Britain is appalling, leading some to call the Conservatives ‘The Pothole Party’. a title that sadly they deserve.

And the result of HS2 cancellation is that London has high speed rail links to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam but not the north of England. What a message.