Steve Rotheram has defended the rising costs to build Liverpool Baltic station.
A further £160 million is required to complete the long-delayed project to revive the site on the edge of the city centre after it received planning permission last year.
The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority were hopeful that funding of £96M would be enough to begin work in late 2025 with a view to a two-year completion.
However fresh funding of £144.4M was recently approved to cover the increased amount after Swedish firm Skanska were confirmed as the preferred contractor.
But speaking on BBC Radio Merseyside on Wednesday (November 11), Mayor Rotheram insisted: “The business case stacks up enormously and it’s much better than any of the stations we’ve got.
“Not all of that is project cost, we’ve built in a contingency and we’ve got some monies which we’ve spoken to Network Rail about, in case there are increases because of construction inflation, so we’ve built all those things into it.
“You’re right, ultimately it’s costing us more than it was originally going to cost us but we’ve included infrastructure in this one, so all of the roadworks and cycle ways and all of that sort of stuff, but it’s still gone up.
“It’s not going up. The land is not ours, it’s owned by Network Rail, the project is not ours and we are the funder because we want a train station there.
“We have to work through all the agencies and they originally gave us the estimated costs for it.
“We’ve gone back, we put £97m in through the CA and they’ve said with construction inflation, we need to increase that amount and we can’t just choose a contractor, we have to go through Network Rail.”