General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

Well, £96 Billion does sound like a lot.

But

More than half of the sum is relevant to work south of Birmingham.

And it seems around £20 Billion is money in existing budgets, not a new financing cost.

So, spread over many years, they will spend less, much less, on rail development in the North, than the £37 Billion of tax payers' money they blew in months on abortive 'test & trace' endeavour. (hobbled for ideological reasons, so was never going to succeed)

We will never know the figure, but I suspect that it is even less than the amount they pilfered from the taxpayer when crooked behaviour prevailed during the anomalies in contracts in early response to Covid 19.