内容摘要：“We were very, very cross about that. We felt that signalled an attitude at HS2, that it was other people's money that they were spending, and they were looking after their own,” Dame Meg Hillier MP (Labour and Co-Op), then chair of the committee, told me.

“We were very, very cross about that. We felt that signalled an attitude at HS2, that it was other people's money that they were spending, and they were looking after their own,” Dame Meg Hillier MP (Labour and Co-Op), then chair of the committee, told me.

Opposition came from Tory MPs speaking on behalf of unhappy Chilterns residents.They demanded expensive tunnels and cuttings to keep the new trains out of sight.

Preserving the rolling hills meant more money went on engineering.In the end, 11 tunnels were commissioned between London and Birmingham, burying the line for 32 miles of the 140 mile track. There were 50 viaducts.Philip Hammond was Conservative transport secretary from 2010 to 2011 and Chancellor from 2016 to 2019.

“I think we drove much more cost into the project than people perhaps were understanding at the time,” he says.In 2011, HS2 was costed at £32 billion. By 2013, the budget had risen to just over £50 billion.

From the start, questions have been raised about HS2’s use of taxpayers’ money.

In 2009, the Labour government had set up HS2 Limited: a company spending public money, one whose existence was by definition dependent on the project not being dropped.Francesca gave birth to Marley through IVF in October 2020, but the mother-of-two admitted it was a "worrying time" to be pregnant.

"We knew there was Covid in other countries but we didn't know it would equate to what it did here," she said."If you got poorly, it was hard to think what was going to happen to the baby, what was going to happen to you, I tried not to go out at all.

"Even after we had the babies we couldn't go to any pregnancy classes, it was hard."Despite these challenges, the friendship between Leo and Marley made the initial struggles worthwhile, the mothers said.