“A transformation in transport connectivity between the cities of the north is vital to realising their potential to become a ‘northern powerhouse’ for the UK’s economy,” the transport secretary said.
“Passengers, businesses, local communities and their representatives across the north told us that railway services must be revitalised and expanded.”
Few would disagree. The minister in question, however, was not the current transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, but Sir Patrick McLoughlin. He was speaking in 2015, at a time when the coalition government was proposing High Speed 3: a bold new east-west line through the Pennines to connect Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford and Leeds.
Fast forward (not something that happens much on trains in the north) to 2026, and here’s the incumbent transport secretary speaking to Times Radio: “People in the north of England for too long have had to put up with second-rate rail systems. They have got creaking Victorian infrastructure, slow trains, poor reliability, and this has to change.”
Ms Alexander says the latest plan has four stages:
- Improving links between Leeds and Bradford, York and Sheffield
- Building a new line between Liverpool, Warrington, Manchester airport and Manchester
- A new trans-Pennine route, as originally envisaged with HS3
- A new link between Birmingham and Manchester, as promised with HS2
So, when will passengers notice any improvement? Perhaps a decade from now, if they live in Yorkshire. “We anticipate that work will start on that in the 2030s,” says the transport secretary.
You can sense the relief at the Treasury. All that the government has committed is “a down payment on the north of infrastructure” of £1.1bn – barely a mile of track on the catastrophic HS2 project. No actual spades in the ground; this is for “planning, development and design work”.
I imagine the discussion at the Treasury went like this.
Civil servant one: “The government wants to spend more money on new railways in the north of England.”
Civil servant two: “Well, obviously, we can’t trust the railways with public money. Look what happened after we gave the go-ahead for HS2: the budget trebled with items like the £100m ‘bat tunnel’ and the length of the line halved.”
CS 1: “So what can we do?”
CS 2: “Say we’re looking into improving links but not this decade.”
To be fair, tens of billions of taxpayer cash is being squandered on HS2 because previous governments let contracts without a clear plan – and ministers then kept changing their minds. The original, visionary plan for a Y-shaped network linking both Manchester and Leeds with Birmingham and the line to London suffered death by a thousand U-turns.
Then-prime minister Rishi Sunak sealed the destruction of sensible transport planning in October 2023 when he gleefully announced he was scrapping the HS2 link from Birmingham to Crewe and onwards to Manchester.
This is the stretch of line that is needed more desperately than any other. You might remember the prestige express train from Manchester to London that the Office of Rail and Road said could not carry actual passengers. The reason that was given for the now-reversed decision: lack of capacity on the West Coast Main Line, and the need to maintain “firebreaks” to allow recovery from disruption.
Of all the links that the north of England needs for improved connectivity with the rest of the nation, Birmingham to Manchester is the most critical. The land needed as far as Crewe is already reserved. Yet instead of going ahead with something that has been years in the planning, the project is being put on hold for at least two decades.
I’ve seen some cans kicked down the road or into the long grass in my time, notably on airport expansion, but this announcement trumps them all. Around the middle of the century, we’ll take another look at the Birmingham to Manchester line that everyone agrees is desperately needed right now. Yes: the 2050 from Manchester Piccadilly is not a train leaving at 10 to nine in the evening, but the possible year a fast line to Birmingham might begin.
Time for some guarded optimism. A decade from now, and many years behind schedule, HS2’s first stage should be running. I predict it will be hailed as a huge success despite the disgraceful waste it has involved – and trigger demands for urgent action on more of the same further north, on a line that is already agreed.
And if I am wrong? Perhaps by then we will all be whizzing around on personal jet packs. I await a government announcement on that very topic…
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