PLANS for the vastly expensive High Speed 2 - or HS2 - rail link continue to provoke controversy.

A national newspaper reported yesterday that prominent figures in local government and business said that failure to build the rail link would be a "disaster".

But another news report, also dated yesterday, said that leading Tories in the West Midlands are calling for the whole thing to be scrapped.

What is to be done about this giant project, which the government says will end up costing £56 billion, but which critics fear will end up costing a lot more?

Has so much money already been spent on it that it cannot be reversed, or brought to a halt?

The answer to that question s simply 'no', and to argue otherwise is simply to fall for what the economists call 'the sunk cost fallacy'.

If it is determined that HS2 is a waste of money, then whatever has already been spent is gone, and there is simply no point in throwing good money after bad.

The case for HS2 was always that it would save money by transporting business executives faster than ever between some of the UK's busiest towns, this minimising the unproductive downtime they spend on public transport.

But the fallacy here is clear: most business people DO work on the train, and furthermore, they always did so, even in the dim and distant days before laptops and wi-fi connections, as anyone over the age of about 50 will recall.

A lot of rail users fear that HS2 will become a money pit, soaking up funding that could be used to maintain and improve services on lesser railway lines that are nonetheless used by tens of thousands of commuters and other travellers a day.

According to Which?, passengers lost almost four million hours to ‘significantly delayed’ journeys in 2018 with nearly a quarter of a million trains cancelled.

Many would feel that public funds would be better spent improving these services than in funding a gigantic infrastructure project that it is all to plausible to see as a politicians' vanity trip.

The government's first duty to the public is to spend our money wisely, and in this case, it is far from clear that HS2 will be the best recipient of the cash.