Dr Adam Marshall: The strategic case for HS2 (short version)
Transcript
You see business people up and down the country who say our infrastructure isn’t good enough to support their growth ambitions, and the railway network is no exception. So huge numbers of companies say to us if we could only have greater capacity on the railway network, we’d actually be able to grow our businesses much more strongly, we’d have confidence investing ourselves, and there would be a huge economic benefit to the country as a whole. And so many Chambers of Commerce have said to us listen, we support HS2, we support it not because of speed but because of the huge amount of additional capacity it adds to our rail system. Without that capacity, our ability to get people and goods to where they need to be, our ability to trade, the sort of lifeblood of our existence, will really be severely weakened, and it’s that that we’re listening to when we say that the BCC supports HS2 and believes that its economic case is strong.