Have you been on a train in the north recently? Yes, but I wouldn’t want to say exactly where I went...
JW: This week figures show only 45 per cent of Northern Rail services are arriving on time. George Osborne had promised a better franchise in 2014. He’d also promised capacity upgrades to Piccadilly Station, which was supposed to remove the bottleneck at the centre of Manchester, affecting the whole of the north. Neither of those things have happened - we’ve got a failing franchise and we’ve still not got the infrastructure improvements at Piccadilly. So in your manifesto, will you be promising to scrap the Northern Rail franchise and will you be committing to doing those upgrades at Piccadilly?
BJ: Well on the franchise, I certainly agree with you about the problems that commuters are experiencing, travellers are experiencing, I can see it for myself.
We need to invest massively in rail so without going into the details of what we want to do at Manchester Piccadilly, we also want to invest in Northern Powerhouse Rail and that’s been announced already - we will do the Leeds to Manchester link which I think will make a big difference to this part of the country, to help unite really important growth areas for the UK.
We’ll also be investing in basic commuter rail services and where there is infra that needs to be improved or upgraded we will do it. This is now the time to do it. Interest rates are at the right level, incredibly low, and so [Chancellor] Sajid Javid and I have agreed that there is going to be an infrastructure revolution.
So we will do the upgrades that we can and plainly Manchester Piccadilly is prime amongst them. But we’re also today announcing a big package of reopening of lines that have been shut since Dr Beeching, decades ago, closed them.
And I think there’ll be a massive benefit to commuters in the area because often it’s not just the big ticket stuff that you need to do, but stuff that really affects people’s daily lives.
And on the roads as well. It’s about bottlenecks and junctions, it’s about widening schemes. And if you improve roads, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily doing things that are not green, if you have clean transport.
JW: But it’s more than five years since George Osborne promised these rail upgrades, including the Northern Powerhouse Rail network that you’re talking about. You’re only committing to Manchester to Leeds; he was talking about east-west rail links in 2014.
He also said the northern franchise would ‘see not just better services... but also better journeys’. That was in June 2014. So why should anybody believe these promises now?
BJ: Because now is the time to deliver on big infrastructure spending because interest rates are at the right level.
JW: But they were low then as well, weren’t they?
BJ: Well we’ve had a long period in which we’ve had to manage the finances prudently because of the debts that were run up under the last Labour government.
And it’s been sensible to do that but we now think this is the moment to invest not just in the NHS and so Manchester North General Hospital [sic] we’re putting in seed funding for a total rebuild of that hospital, but also in infrastructure projects as well as policing, education and all the other priorities. exactly where I went. But I’m on trains all over the place all the time. I’m on a train in the north roughly once a month. Or once a week. I don’t know. But I’m constantly travelling around by train. But your point about the Northern Rail franchise, yes I totally get and we are going to sort it out.
JW: Have you ruled out re-nationalising it?
BJ: Ah...what the railways need is proper investment in infrastructure. And I’m very attracted by the Williams plan [to reorganise the rail franchising system], which you will have seen. We want a solution of the kind that we did in London and that’s what we’ll do.
JW: I wanted to ask you about homelessness. The government tends to talk about rough sleeping quite a lot, but in Manchester we have a huge issue with statutory homelessness and the number of people going to the town hall for help with that.
We’ve seen a 400% increase in the number of families being placed in temporary accommodation because of the housing market here, the benefits cap and lack of social housing.
People are talking increasingly here about the need to suspend Right to Buy in high pressure areas and to build more social housing. Will either of those two things be in the
BJ: Well, we have built record amounts of housing just in the last year.
JW: But that’s not being felt in Manchester, is it?
BJ: If not, then we need to do more. But the answer is to build more homes and affordable homes, including homes for all tenures, whether it’s social rent or mixed tenure or whatever, we need to do the lot. And we will.
With homelessness in particular you need also to address all sorts of issues that face people and yes you’re right to make the distinction between homelessness and rough sleeping but very often there is... issues come together in people’s lives to cause them to become homeless and you have to address
them all in the round.
JW: The biggest reason in Manchester is private sector evictions, though and the Local Housing Allowance cap is a very large part of that, as is Universal Credit. So will there be any pledges around welfare in the Tory manifesto?
BJ: We are putting up the living wage by the biggest ever amount, so we’re trying to put more money into the pockets of people across the country, particularly the lowest earners and support them in any way we can.