Northern transport hub to be set up in Yorkshire

Hundreds of civil service jobs moved out of capital

A NORTHERN hub of transport jobs is to be created in Leeds, with hundreds of civil service roles moved out of the capital, the Government has announced.

The Department for Transport (DfT) has said it will be creating an initial 650 jobs across Leeds and Birmingham by 2025, with 100 being recruited for now.

And MPs welcomed the move, but were also clear much more needed to be done to improve transport in West Yorkshire.

The Government has already pledged to move 22,000 civil servants out of London by 2030, and has also announced that 50 per cent of senior roles will also be outside of the capital by then.

And Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said it was an “historic move”.

“Transport is absolutely vital to the local communities we serve and having hubs in major cities like Birmingham and Leeds will offer a fresh perspective on how we can better serve these areas,” he said.

However Fabian Hamilton, Labour MP for Leeds North East, said: “While the creation of any new jobs in Leeds is welcome, it’s going to take much more than moving a small part of one Government department to bridge the North/South divide and end the jobs crisis we now face across the country.

“Leeds is still the largest city in Europe without a rail-based public transport system. We need meaningful investment so we can create the green jobs our city so desperately needs.”

His Leeds North West colleague Alex Sobel added: “I always welcome to Government moving jobs out of London, I hope this will also signal a shift in per head public transport funding where the North loses out many times over to London.

“It’s important that these roles focus on decarbonising transport and delivering schemes like the West Yorkshire metro mass transport, which is long overdue.”

It comes as Boris Johnson published a major new bus strategy which aims to bring simpler fares and flexible services.

It is hoped the £3bn programme will mean more reliable and frequent services across the country, with daily price caps, evening and weekend services boosted, and integrated services and ticketing.

However the move will raise eyebrows after the £150m budget to deliver integrated ticketing – where tickets work across different modes of transport much like London’s Oyster card – was taken from Transport for the North in January.

Mr Johnson said: “Buses are lifelines and liberators connecting people to jobs they couldn’t otherwise take, driving pensioners and young people to see their friends, sustaining town centres and protecting the environment.

“As we build back better from the pandemic, better buses will be one of our first acts of levelling up.”

NOW THE Department for Transport plans to relocate an unspecified number of Whitehall civil servants to Leeds, there might – just – be an increased likelihood of the city receiving the funding that it needs for its mass transit network.

After all, Leeds is the largest city in western Europe not to have any form of light rail and this could come as quite a shock to DfT officials accustomed to the London Underground. The question, however, is whether they relocate here – or simply commute to their department’s ‘Northern hub’ after Birmingham was named as the location for the DfT’s “second HQ”.

This is certainly not the relocation of entire Whitehall departments out of London, as The Yorkshire Post and others advocated, and which Ministers appeared to endorse. Yet, while it is another vote of confidence in Leeds, this decision – and Boris Johnson’s new bus revolution – fail to mask an incoherence at the heart of plans to tackle regional inequalities.

Not only is there little clarity over the objectives of its so-called ‘levelling up’ strategy, but there’s disturbing evidence at how the Towns Fund and Levelling Up Fund appear to be favouring Tory seats, or electoral targets, rather than the areas with the greatest disadvantage.

This has seen a debate about ‘levelling up’ or ‘sprucing up’ morph into accusations of cronyism – even more so now that details of Penistone and Stocksbridge’s apparent preferential treatment are coming to light. That’s why Ministers must offer total transparency this week before they risk lasting reputational damage to two flagship funds that were set up with good intentions.