Business leaders say ‘we’re tired of broken promises’
EIGHT YEARS ON FROM GEORGE OSBORNE’S NORTHERN POWERHOUSE SPEECH, NORTH STILL GETS SECOND-CLASS SOLUTIONS, SAY CRITICS
BUSINESS leaders battling plans for a surface turnback station at Manchester Piccadilly have slammed a Government continuing to ‘run roughshod’ over the Northern Powerhouse promises made eight years ago.
It was on June 23 2014, that thenChancellor George Osborne made his ‘Northern Powerhouse’ speech at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.
He spoke of how, combined, the northern cities of this country could ‘take on the world.’ He also described at length how the government would enable this. A high speed route between Manchester and Leeds and the second phase of HS2 came front and centre of the plan.
Eight years later, and the Manchester Evening News has launched another campaign around a transport project which, say leaders here, will turn swathes of the city centre into a building site, and blight land with viaducts.
And it fails, they say, to future-proof the capacity, reliability and resilience on the rail network that passengers so desperately need.
Manchester council’s analysis shows the loss of valuable land will cost 14,000 potential jobs, while the overground station will rob the economy of the North of £333m a year up to 2050.
And yet the many pleas for the preferred option of an underground through-station have, up to the second reading of the bill this week, gone unanswered. On Monday rail minister Wendy Morton rejected calls for an underground solution describing the - so far unsubstantiated - £5bn cost as a ‘crazy amount of money,’ despite a £4bn overspend on London’s Crossrail.
But business leaders here have vowed to keep pushing against the cut-price plan to build a hub on 500,000 sq metres of prime development land.
Referring to the impact a surface station could have on Manchester’s ‘Innovation District’ - a £1.5bn development venture from the University of Manchester and Bruntwood SciTech, Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “This emerging quarter will dwarf the success of the Oxford Road corridor and bring investment and research and development innovation to the region. But we don’t want to lose the huge pocket of land next to that as this will naturally expand over the coming decades.”
He said losing an underground through-station would be a blow not only to HS2 but also for Northern Powerhouse Rail - the east-west links which were downgraded in last year’s Integrated Rail Plan.
Crucially, a turn-back surface station, rather than an underground throughhub, means NPR could not be brought back to life in the future as the hub will hit full capacity from day one.
He said: “The Government clearly thinks this isn’t a priority and Manchester
should feel lucky with what it’s getting. The problem is that the economic benefits of this railway are eroding, they are cutting costs in the northern sections to cover up their own mistakes.”
Mr Murison added: “We’ve had broken promises, second class answers. Eight years after George Osbone committed to the Northern Powerhouse and a shared ambition between leaders, civic leaders, Government and businesses has been run roughshod over by this Government.”
Lou Cordwell, Chief Creative Officer of Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership said: “Overall it’s a less efficient and less resilient way of operating rail services. The underground option will give us a seamless onward connectivity and lower operational risk.
“In other words, we need to invest in a modern solution that puts us on a par with other leading European cities, shows the world that the Government is committed to its levelling up agenda and that we’re serious about being a globally significant economy.
“We must invest in a future-proofed underground option that is designed to last 100-plus years and empowers us to deliver the growth we know can be unlocked.
“An underground through-station will make the right statement for a city of Manchester’s ambition and profile. We’re home to one of the new Innovation Accelerators and a future key player in the global innovation ecosystem with a longstanding innovation heritage, after all Manchester was home to the first inter-city railway in the world. For this reason we’d like to see value and affordability evaluated on the basis of the whole-life return to the Greater Manchester and UK economy.”
Chris Ogles, chief executive of Bruntwood said an underground station would ‘unlock’ the vision of the Northern Powerhouse, he said - linking the cities of the M62 corridor in a ‘single market and labour pool.’