Investment the North...

keeping promises to build HS2 to the North, in full, including the Eastern leg and a fully-funded station at Manchester Airport.

It also means the East Coast Mainline finally being upgraded to allow for more services, including extra capacity north of York, as well as the electrification of routes around Hull, Selby and Sheffield.

Otherwise yet another generation will be blighted by the same old creaking, congested, neglected Victorian railways we have long suffered. And our economy will continue to underperform.

Ministers cannot claim ignorance. They have long known that the North of England does not have the connections it needs.

As Boris Johnson’s own manifesto promised less than two years ago: “If this Conservative government is returned to office, we will have an infrastructure revolution for this country. Now is the time to invest in Northern Powerhouse Rail.”

Indeed the prime minister was so enthusiastic about the Manchester

to Leeds stretch of NPR that he specifically promised to build it before the last election.

“A new Trans-Pennine rail route between Manchester and Leeds will be confirmed today,” said a Downing Street press notice issued ahead of Boris Johnson’s 2019 speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry. The press release promised ‘new intercity rail routes,’ ‘with Manchester to Leeds as the first step.’

If that promise is broken, it will be added to a much longer roll-call of fine political words that never translated into reality. We have now been waiting seven years for the government to deliver on a promise made by George Osborne in 2014: two new platforms at Manchester Piccadilly and an expansion at Oxford Road. That would have unblocked a key part of the entire Northern rail network.

It didn’t happen. Instead, that bottleneck through Castlefield helped drive train services across the region into meltdown in May 2018. Services were then cut as we waited for the promised investment to materialise. Patience has now run out. Words are not enough.

“In the area of transport, we are still selling the North’s potential short,” a Conservative backbencher told the House of Commons in 2017. “The ‘Northern Powerhouse’ is a wonderful phrase, but the people of Northern England deserve more than a slogan. They need action.”

That backbencher was Rishi Sunak, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. And we couldn’t agree more.