There are now a large number of competing economic analyses of HS2, all unsurprisingly reflecting the viewpoints of the organisations that commissioned them.

In fairness, these reports by various companies expert in financing, infrastructure, transport consulting and so on tend to focus on different aspects of the project, which is why they are all able to come up with such conflicting figures, conclusions and recommendations.

Today’s PwC report, for instance, focuses on the return on investment resulting from ‘selling off’ the infrastructure as a concession – a tactic which proved lucrative for the Government with HS1.

But this is very different from looking at the likely ticket revenues or wider socio-economic and business impact, for example, and different again from the recent report from the sceptical Institute of Economic Affairs which is a wider summary of the case against HS2 covering its environmental impact and ‘false’ regeneration claims on top of the economic case.

As the consultation deadlines approaches, the DfT’s own experts will have an awful lot of paper to plough through to separate fact from fiction.