HS2 Cost Triples as EasyJet Posts £552M Loss, UK Migration Falls

"If I look angry, it's because I am," Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told the Commons on Monday 18 May as she set out the new HS2 envelope: £87.7-102.7 billion (€101.1-118.4 billion) for the London-Birmingham route, service entry no earlier than 2036, the Euston-Old Oak Common segment now slipping to 2040. HS2 Ltd chief executive Mark Wild's fifteen-month review, made public the same day, more than doubled the project's 2012 budget of £37.2 billion. The northern branches to Manchester and Leeds, cut in 2021 and 2023 respectively, do not return. French construction group Vinci, through joint ventures and its British subsidiary Taylor Woodrow, is building the 90-kilometre Midlands section, Old Oak Common station and a Birmingham depot.

EasyJet booked a £552 million pre-tax loss for the six months to 31 March on Thursday, against a £394 million loss a year earlier, as fuel prices and weaker consumer confidence bit. The carrier said forward bookings for the summer season were down on last year and warned of potential petrol rationing in Asia and Europe if the Iran war continued, repeating an IATA assessment. EasyJet's hedges are running out — the same fuel pressure that drove its profit warning and a parallel one from TUI; the Guardian reported that jet fuel prices have risen nearly 84% since 28 February, when the US-Israeli war on Iran began.

Brussels meanwhile issued a public rebuke of London's quiet rollback of Russia-oil sanctions. EU Economy Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis criticised the UK for issuing a sanctions licence exempting jet fuel and diesel from a fresh ban on imports of oil products made from Russian crude, without consulting G7 allies — Politico Europe reported the move as a "surprise" rollback that the EU saw days before the bloc's own equivalent regime takes effect. Foreign Office officials had apologised earlier in the week. The episode places London again at odds with Brussels on the energy-sanctions perimeter and with Kyiv on the policy substance.

The Office for National Statistics put 2025 net migration at 171,000, the lowest level since 2012 excluding the pandemic and roughly half the 2024 figure — a drop driven by fewer arrivals from outside the EU for work and study, after policy tightening on salary thresholds and student and care-worker dependent rules. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood credited the tightening for the result. Asylum claims, however, climbed: arrivals via small boats and other irregular routes pulled in the opposite direction to the work-route number. The same day, S&P Global's flash UK Composite PMI showed business activity contracting in May for the first time in more than a year, with services and manufacturing both below 50; the data sit on the Bank of England's desk for the June meeting.