The Tories’ rail plan: selling out the North?

In the run-up to the Conservative Party conference, Tory sources briefed that Boris

Johnson was the “delivery man”, said

Jessica Elgot in The Guardian. Having pushed through an extraordinary vaccine roll-out, he’d now be bringing the same sense of ambition to his domestic agenda.

Yet when Transport Secretary Grant

Shapps unveiled the Government’s much anticipated Integrated Rail Plan last week, it added to a distinct sense that the wheels are coming off the “delivery van”. As recently as 2019, the PM had promised to build a high-speed Northern Powerhouse

Rail line from Manchester to Leeds, to

“unleash regional growth”; earlier this year, he said he was also committed to the eastern leg of HS2, from Birmingham to

Leeds. But both have now been all but scrapped, prompting outrage from MPs and civic leaders in the affected regions, some of whom had spent years preparing for the new lines. The Government’s critics dubbed it a “rail betrayal”.

Actually, it was nothing of the sort, said Ross Clark in the Daily Mail. Given all his talk of “levelling up”, the optics may not look good for the PM, but the truth is, HS2 was never about reinvigorating the “forgotten” towns of the former industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North; it was conceived to boost big city centres. The new plan puts that right, by pouring tens of billions into upgrading existing lines and integrating them into the remaining high-speed system, so that towns and cities missing from the original blueprint have better services. For instance, the eastern HS2 line did not stop at Derby or Nottingham en route to Leeds. Now, although the line will end a few miles to the south of those cities, at East Midlands Parkway, trains from it will travel on to them on upgraded existing track. Journeys from Leeds to London will undoubtedly be slower than planned, but still faster than they are now; and Leeds will also benefit from a new tram system, making overall journey times shorter still. As for the abandoned section of Northern Powerhouse Rail from Leeds to Manchester, that project was always hard to justify, given the cities are only 35 miles apart; and the alternative plan, to upgrade the TransPennine line, will cut journey times almost as effectively.

That’s scant consolation to the people of Bradford, said the FT. The UK’s seventh-largest city had hoped to be on the Northern Powerhouse route; now, it will remain stuck with some of the worst rail connections of any British city. There will, of course, be winners too – as you’d expect from a plan costing £96bn. But the Government’s assessments of what can be achieved with electrification and new signalling are optimistic. Besides, talk about faster journey times is a bit of a distraction, said The Economist. “The real point of building new high-speed lines, as ministers ought to have said much more loudly a decade ago, is to remove fast trains” from existing main lines. This will create more capacity for local stopping services, and also for freight, relieving pressure on congested motorways. In other words, the scrapped HS2 line would have brought transport benefits to people who lived nowhere near its stops.

Even so, news that HS2 was being pruned caused delight as well as dismay, said John Ashmore on CapX. Some Tory MPs were “jumping for joy”. It may not be “entirely coincidental” that scrapping the eastern leg means no disfiguring and disruptive construction projects in such recently won Tory seats as Rother Valley, Bolsover and Ashfield. People in these constituencies may have felt they would have derived little upside from the project; but that may be wrong. Making big cities more prosperous does help surrounding areas. On the other hand, when proponents of HS2 talk about boosting connectivity and capacity, they often fail to acknowledge the staggering cost of the project, “the weakness of the Government’s business case or, indeed, the opportunity cost of using the money elsewhere”. The last is “what exercises MPs in areas” where there isn’t even an adequate bus service.

“The assessments of what can be achieved with electrification and new

signalling are optimistic”

In the North, as elsewhere, there has always been scepticism about HS2, said David Olusoga in The Guardian. Some question its environmental cost; others the need for faster access to the South, after the home-working revolution. But Northern Powerhouse Rail, bringing together the economies of several large cities and expanding opportunities for eight million people, was different. This was a project that would have enabled northern economies to compete with the South, and given northerners a taste of the kinds of services Londoners take for granted. Had the Government been serious about “levelling up”, it would have had a serious plan to pay for the line, not let it fall at the first hurdle. Still, few northerners were surprised: they’re so used to being let down and “left behind”, they’d not really expected it to go ahead.