True cost of the Hs2 'enormously wrong'
He says the price tag Parliament was given for the high speed rail line was "hundreds of millions of pounds too low"
Jane Tyler
Artist's impression of the HS2 train
A former boss of HS2 has claimed MPs were misled over the true cost of the project.
He says the price tag Parliament was given for the high speed rail line was "hundreds of millions of pounds too low".
Most of that under-estimating was due to not calculating correctly how much it would cost the Government to buy properties along the route.
In the West Midlands thousands of homeowners and businesses have seen their lives turned upside down because the rail line will go through their properties.
Doug Thornton, who was a senior figure inside HS2, was interviewed by Panorama about the ailing project.
The programme was shown on BBC1 on Monday, December 17.
In the show he will claim that the early costs MPs were given when asked to approve HS2 were "enormously wrong".
HS2 is the biggest infrastructure project in Europe.
The Government says it will cost £56bn, with the first phase from London to Birmingham coming in at £27bn.
Mr Thornton tells Panorama that he was sacked after he refused to use figures he believed were misleading.
"I have never seen anything like it," he told the BBC.
"I was absolutely appalled... that numbers could be advanced in such a loose and slapdash fashion.
"There was a gap of almost 100 per cent in terms of the wrong numbers of properties that the organisation had not budgeted for."
Mr Thornton had previously told the Sunday Times how HS2 worked out its budget for buying land and buildings on "rudimentary map-based analysis by interns".
In Birmingham, hundreds of businesses told BirminghamLive they have been forced out of their premises to make way for the project.
Many are in Alum Rock and Ward End whose premises are being bought up under Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) so a train repair depot can be built.
They include Darren Bartlet, who owns units in Hereford Square in the High Street, Adnan Bhatti, who rents one of them for his car repair business, and Akhtar Gul, who runs a car wash business.
All the men spoke to Birmingham Live in July to say they were unhappy with the compensation they were offered by HS2.
Dad-of-four Mr Bhatti said he faces financial ruin because the amount he had been offered wasn't enough to fund the relocation.
"Without the compensation I can't afford to relocate, so that leaves me, my wife and four kids with a mortgage to pay and no money coming in," he told Birmingham Live at the time.
Another Midlands businessman, Paul Tropman who owns Wood Waste, a wood recycling business in Garratts Green, told Panorama he'd also been left out of pocket.
"I've been left hundreds of thousands pounds out of pocket after my business was forced to relocate," he told the BBC.
"I think they've overspent and the only way they can get their money back is by robbing the likes of us."
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