How the Government has the opportunity to recognise Yorkshire’s potential - Henri Murison

Leeds was promised there would be an alternative to get HS2 services to the city - but more than a year later a study to achieve this was eventually launched and then cancelled before it could actually do any work. The need to preserve land for a variety of different station options in Leeds prevented developers investing private capital in this region. Even land for an HS2 depot, which we will sadly definitely not need, cannot be built on.

Although Bradford did then get put back on the map when more of HS2 was then cancelled by Rishi Sunak, time was lost and a new station pushed further into the future than it should have been. The electrification of the line to Hull is still yet to begin - despite it having much development work done.

Lord Blunkett, a hugely respected figure in this region and nationally, with the Yorkshire Rail Plan has taken the opportunity to draw a line in the sand.

The White Rose proposition is to better connect the cities, towns and key assets like Leeds Bradford Airport to each other and transport within our respective city regions, including tram networks.

The business community, including the Northern Powerhouse Partnership which I lead, have been consistent. We know Yorkshire needs vital links between Leeds and Sheffield to be electrified, as Northern Powerhouse Rail always envisaged despite the investment HS2 would have contributed with a new line right into Leeds city centre having been previously lost.

We need a new station in Bradford, we need electrification to Hull – we need all of what Northern Powerhouse Rail as a network showed would connect not just Yorkshire - but all of Yorkshire with the North.

Last week, when stating his ambitions for the parts of Northern Powerhouse Rail between Liverpool and Manchester in the Houses of Parliament Andy Burnham re-stated his commitment to the links to key cities like Sheffield and Bradford.

Mayor Oliver Coppard is right to have re-stated clearly this week that South Yorkshire needs to be linked to Manchester and to London. I back fully an HS2 connection for Sheffield to Birmingham and from Bradford a new line from Britain’s youngest city to Huddersfield to open up Manchester Airport as well as services to Liverpool.

The key point to remember about rail investment here across the North is that the case for a new line from Bradford to Huddersfield is enhanced if you also build a new line to Manchester Airport from Piccadilly station as the same train services will use both.

It is not a zero-sum game, but instead based on a phased approach, developing one improved connection in one part of a region means trains which may start and finish huge distances away can have enhanced capacity.

A new high-capacity network linking the North’s great cities and their wider regions is just as essential now as when it was first accepted as government policy over a decade ago.

The problem is while early collaboration between leaders like Baroness Blake, then Leader of Leeds, and George Osborne, then Chancellor, set the direction, successive Conservative Prime Ministers and Chancellors have failed to follow through, too often favouring rhetoric over delivery.

With some exceptions, like Lord Philip Hammond, political leadership has fallen short. Boris Johnson stood in front of Stephenson’s Rocket in Manchester, but he in the end let down Yorkshire and the North collectively.

It is right that businesses and Metro Mayors articulate their regional priorities but they must also come together to make the simple unarguable case: together, the North is greater than the sum of its parts and its productivity can be supercharged.

The government has rightly made its intentions clear - on the back of TransPennine Route Upgrade and linked works needed at Leeds station, we are beginning to see the start of an economic corridor from Hull to Liverpool including Leeds and Sheffield.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves now has the opportunity in her spending review to give the government’s backing to this with the same scale and cross-government commitment that was given to the Oxford-Cambridge corridor.

We in the North of England have scale. Yorkshire and the Humber, and the wider North, represent huge economic potential as part of a wider prize, creating million more better paid jobs by 2050.

Henri Murison is the chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.