UK: Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham remains confident that funding remains available for the development of a new Liverpool – Manchester railway serving Manchester Airport and a new underground station in Manchester following the recent change of government.
‘As far as I know there’s no change; that money is in the plan’, he told Rail Business UK on July 10. ‘In fact, what we’re talking to the government about is the Take Back Control Bill, the devolution bill that is going to be in the King’s Speech I believe. That is an opportunity to create devolved powers over land value capture to support the development of infrastructure. It might help us with [expansion of the] Metrolink [light rail network] and the business case that we want to build there.’
Noting that the first meeting of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Board is scheduled to take place later this month, Burnham explained that ‘we’re planning a bigger meeting in Liverpool in September with a wider range of stakeholders. I’ve set an ambition with the other stakeholders and the government to start work on the line within this Parliament. I think we need to get some focus into this. We have a bill that was carried over between the last parliament and into the new one; there are lots of reasons for optimism about it.’
Manchester – Birmingham challenge
Meanwhile, Burnham confirmed that work would continue on proposals to develop additional rail capacity between Birmingham and Manchester, following the abrupt cancellation of HS2 phases 2a and 2b by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
He expressed optimism that no land would be sold off whilst consultation continues, despite the previous government’s reported desire to do so. ‘As I understand it, I don’t think any land was sold’, he told Rail Business UK.
‘That land assembly that had gone on for the Birmingham – Manchester section of HS2 is still in public ownership. I think the safeguarding was lifted, but no further action was taken. So reinstating that safeguarding might be a sensible thing to preserve options.
‘What I do know from the work that [former West Midlands mayor] Andy Street and I commissioned, through the private sector working group, is that there has basically been an agreement with DfT that in time the West Coast Main Line could not cope with these HS2 trains — which is what we were saying at the start. There may be a marginal disagreement about the date at which that saturation is reached, but I don’t think there’s a disagreement that it will be reached in the 2030s.
‘I just think it’s not about rebuilding [sic] HS2. Everyone leaps to that conclusion. It’s not about that, [we are] simply saying that there has to be a capacity solution for Birmingham to Manchester or that will become a barrier to growth between the two biggest cities outside London. If we just leave this debate where it is now, in the end you’re creating a barrier to growth which I would expect the current government would want to remove.’
