Lawmaker questions China's offer to build UK high speed rail
Allowing China's state-run railway to create a high-speed rail line linking London with central and northern England will be an "extremely questionable" decision, a prominent British lawmaker said Saturday.
Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative lawmaker who chairs the U.K. parliament's influential Foreign Affairs Committee, told BBC radio that he also had doubts about the ability of China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC) to build the rail line in five years, given the vast differences between your two countries on issues such as for example planning applications, property rights and protected landscapes.
The company has transformed China's transport system, building almost all of China's 15,500-mile high-speed network in the last couple of decades.
His comments came after Britain's Department for Transport confirmed that "preliminary discussions" took place between CRCC and the massive infrastructure project to boost rail lines to Britain's central and northern regions known as HS2. According to the Financial Times newspaper, CRCC wrote to HS2 LEADER Mark Thurston last month saying it might build the rail line at a less cost and accommodate far faster trains.
First approved a decade ago, the project has been the subject of repeated delays and reviews. Trains were at first scheduled to begin running in 2026.
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave his support to the project even though it's running way over budget. The projected cost, estimated at 33 billion pounds in 2011, has soared to as much as 106 billion pounds ($137 billion) and it's not set to be fully completed until 2040.
"The key reason why Chinese projects in China are incredibly often so quick is basically because they don't really worry about such minor matters as planning consent or workers' rights," Tugendhat said. "It appears extremely unlikely that without really short-cutting a variety of labor conditions that it would be possible."
The news headlines of potential Chinese interest in the HS2 project follows the government's confirmation that it'll allow Chinese tech giant Huawei to provide new high-speed network equipment.
That move by Johnson's Conservative government ignored the U.S. government's warnings that it would sever intelligence cooperation if the business was not banned. Several Conservative lawmakers, including Tugendhat, have voiced concerns about that decision.
