UK: Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is ready to petition parliament if the Northern Powerhouse Rail and High Speed 2 programmes are cut back or cancelled, he told Rail Business UK following the annual Transport for the North conference.
‘The publication of the Integrated Rail Plan is looming now; the leaks have been out there and it doesn’t look promising at this particular moment in time’, Burnham said on September 21.
‘I hope I’m wrong, I hope it might just be that ministers haven’t fully applied their minds to it and they are about to come up with something different. We’ve got to plan for all eventualities and that’s why we’re now turning our attention quite seriously to petitioning parliament to get what we believe would be the right solution for Greater Manchester.’
‘We’re going to need it all’
Asked whether there was a genuine concern that NPR could be scaled back or cancelled, Burnham said ‘I just hear that it doesn’t feel that positive; there is talk of “will it turn into an upgrade?” and we still believe firmly that a new line via Bradford is critical. From what people pick up, that is dropping down the prioritisation at the moment.’
Burnham noted that the lack of investment goes back many years. ‘There’s been such under-investment under all governments for so long that the north needs a lot of investment. The key point that I would stress is you can’t always force us to choose “is it north-south or east-west?” or is it “inter-city or intra-city?” If we’re to be levelled up to London, we’re going to need it all and it’s as simple as that.
‘I’m very concerned about a kind of sub-optimal plan being forced on us, a sense that we’ll be told the parliamentary bill is coming and we’re just going to have to accept what’s on the table. That would be such a bad place to end up … a massive missed opportunity for the country.’
Burnham said it was important to recognise the gains made in countries which commit to high quality transport networks.
‘We should have transport that people expect in France or Germany; that’s the level we should be operating at. It feels like we always have an ability in this country to shoot ourselves in the foot by making some savings that become a false economy in the long run.
‘You’ve got to see this not over 25 years; you’ve got to see this investment over the 79 years left of this century and beyond.’
‘Wrong design, wrong message’
One concern is TfN’s preferred option for the High Speed 2 station at Manchester Piccadilly to an underground through station enabling trains between Liverpool, Bradford and Leeds to run through without reversing. This option appears to have been ignored in favour of a surface terminus proposed by HS2 Ltd with, as Burnham sees it, little interest in the additional needs of NPR.
‘The message that it is sending out is Manchester doesn’t matter, it is about moving people out of Manchester back down to London, that’s the message’, said Burnham. ‘It is the wrong design, sending out the wrong message, and we hope parliament in the end will change it.’
Parliament should decide
‘The debate we’ve had so far has been largely with public servants and consultants advising HS2, so it has not been a debate in the public domain with ministers, MPs or lords’, Burnham explained. ‘Obviously where this debate has to go in the end is parliament, and it has to decide what it wants for the north of England. It’s not the unelected people who decide, it is going to have to be those in parliament who ultimately decide what the level of ambition is that the country wants for the north.’
In his discussions with HS2 Ltd planners, he felt ‘the ambition does not feel high enough, it’s a sense of just get something built in the north.
‘That’s not good enough, it needs to be better than that. It’s about what we will do to change the northern economy in the 21st century, not just build a railway line.’
