Minister give the green light to 10 billion GBP lower theme,

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The ministers will give the starting signal for a tunnel of 10 billion GBP between Kent and Essex called Lower Thames Crossing after years of delay. The private sector is expected to finance a large part of the project.

Transition secretary Heidi Alexander According to the British government officials, a declaration of consent from the developmental agreements will approve the long -awaited project on Tuesday.

The 14-mile road and the tunnel will be the first completely new Thames river crossing in East Londons for 60 years. The news will come on Wednesday before Rachel Reeves’ spring declaration.

An official said that the project would be an “important strategic route” for drivers, freight and logistics, improves the connectivity between southern England and the Midlands and unlocks regional economic growth.

“This shows the commitment of this government to provide the important infrastructure that the country needs,” they said.

The program has become a symbol of the sclerotic planning system of Great Britain, with more than 1.2 billion GBP being spent on the project, although the construction has not yet started.

The money was spent on planning, consultations, traffic modeling, environmental ratings, legal and advisory fees as well as country purchases.

The planning document for the project is 359,070 pages, which corresponds to almost the entire works of William Shakespeare.

The cost of the tunnel project is already between 5.3 billion and 6.8 billion. GBP increased when it was first agreed for a current forecast of around 10 billion GBP in 2017.

It is expected that construction would begin in 2026 or early 2027 before a planned opening by 2032.

The government still has to decide which method of private financing should be used for the project and a decision that is later expected from the Ministry of Finance this year.

A proposal to have a “regulated asset base” (RAB), in which private investors would collect the income from the street in order to repay their investments about the life of the projects, is taken into account by the Ministry of Finance, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

This option would cost the Ministry of Finance 200 million more in the advance costs than if the government paid the system directly according to a recently carried out National Highway document.

The model used in London’s new Tideway sewer canal would have to be almost 2 billion GBP of tax payer financing, to attract 6.3 billion GBP to private investments, whereby the total cost of the project is covered to at least 9.4 billion GBP.

According to National Highways, there should probably be a “market interest for the regulated private company -deployment option” in which projects are listed that use the same structure, including the SizeWell C nuclear power plant.