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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots,

the spectator's daily politics podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and Fraser Nelson.

HS2 is at risk of further cuts to the retenor for the Birmingham as a chance to look for savings.

Kate, talk us through what's happened so far.

So the government is desperate to find some money. It's looking to find money for its day-to-day

spending and also leading up to an election next year. It's looking for some kind of tax cut

and it seems that HS2 is once again on the chopping block because it is a hugely expensive project

where they might be able to find some money where they could divert that to their personal priorities.

I am in two minds about this story. I've real mixed feelings. On the one hand, HS2 is a

disastrous construction project. It should be scrapped. It is billions and billions of pounds

over budget. It is years delayed and by the time it comes online, it's essentially going to be

out of date. This was never the right construction project for the UK and we should not get caught up

in sunk cost fallacy. The fact that money's already been spent is not mean that we should spend

many, many billions more on the project. We should be looking to enhance local infrastructure

and also think about far better technologies for our transport if we really want to go for something

big. But on the flip side of that, you once again have a government that is looking to cut capital

spending so that it can move that part of money into day-to-day spending. This was the theme

...