North Wales electric rail expected to cost more than £1bn

The UK government has given "a cast-iron commitment" that the electrification of the north Wales main rail line will happen.

Welsh Secretary David TC Davies said the full business case is still to be done but the line will be built.

Welsh ministers dismissed the £1bn cost announced as a "back of a fag packet figure" and a transport expert has put the cost at about £1.5bn or more.

Mr Davies admitted the cost would "probably be a bit higher" than £1bn.

On Thursday, Rishi Sunak announced that £1bn would be provided to electrify the north Wales main line, following his decision to scrap the second leg of the HS2 high speed rail line between Birmingham and Manchester.

Welsh government Economy Minister Vaughan Gething said the £1bn costing was "back of a fag packet stuff".

Speaking on BBC Newsnight, he said no development work had been done into the project.

"If you don't have the development work done then you can't control the costs and they don't really know if a billion pounds will do it," he said.

Prof Stuart Cole, from the University of South Wales and a government adviser on transport, said the prime minister's £1bn figure "presumably includes signalling and straightening the truck".

"However, the figure he used was based on the study in 2015, and construction costs increased by about 7% per annum, so we're now really talking about £1.5bn or more," he said.

Speaking on BBC Radio Wales Breakfast, Mr Davies conceded the £1bn number could not be precise.

"If you want an exact figure, right, it's not going to be a billion pounds," he said. "If you want the exact sums, it's not going to come in at exactly 1,000 million pounds

"You start with a strategic outline business case, then you go to an outline business case and then a full business case, which will give you the cost at the time that that's done, and then usually they go up a little bit, so I'm not going to pretend that that is the exact figure."

Mr Davies denied that the prime minister had made an announcement without anything much behind it.

"It's not a headline without a plan because we have to go through the three case business stage process to get there and it does take time to do that," he said.

"So it is a cast-iron commitment that we will build that line. But, obviously, we'll have to go through the business case process to get there.

"I'm not going to pretend that that will be the exact figure, I suspect it will be probably will be a bit higher than that."

No timescale has been announced for the project.