Wonderful aphasia in the DM

An otherwise unremarkable article about a family in negative equity being slightly shafted by the HS2 route is given colour by the journalist's poor English and/or the sub-editor's poor proof-reading:

Some homes on the train line route face being the subject of a Compulsory Purchase Order by the network - which pays an aggravated valuation of each house.

I rather suspect you mean "aggregated" there, Tammy Hughes..

Still, let's look at the story now we're there. So is the rail line forcing them out of a modest semi?

But they discovered the planned HS2 network high speed rail link between London and Birmingham will pass through their 13 acres of land - just 130-metres from their home.

Oopsie. This is in Warwickshire, and the house is a sprawling 7-bedroom affair. The house was mortgaged for 600K at the height of the property bubble in 2007, but now is only (optimistically) worth 400K. The father of the family died, which is tragic, and yet didn't have a life insurance policy that would pay off any significant amount of the mortgage.

You have to feel sorry for Vikie (sic.) the mother of the family, as it's clearly a hard situation to be in. Nevertheless, if you were intending to spend all your money and borrow up to your limit to get a house of that value, wouldn't it have been a good idea to set aside £50/month for a life insurance policy that would have paid off most of the house?

The real meat is tucked away at the tail of the article:

A spokeswoman for HS2 said: 'We have advised the Shanks' family that their building has not been identified for demolition or as being at risk of demolition in our assessments to date.
'According to the land ownership information we have obtained from Land Registry, the line does appear to pass through some of the land associated with the Shanks’ property.
'Until further design and planning work has been completed we are not in a position to confirm the extent of the land that would need to be acquired.

Ok, so what's the fuss?

'We have advised the family that if it did become necessary to buy land which they own, they would be fully compensated for it.'

Hmm. This smells like the family trying to press-blackmail HS2 into giving them a lot more money than their house is technically worth...