Mistake not to announce Northern Powerhouse Rail at conference - Henri Murison
This weekend, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet will arrive in Liverpool.
Party conferences are full of policy kite flying: but for the governing party the announcements made there are real decisions that will affect lives in the short term, not just headline grabbers that may or may not make it into a manifesto still four years from being written.
In my time at the Northern Powerhouse Partnership I have had some of my most challenging times at conferences – not least when the then Party of government, led by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, cancelled HS2 to the North while standing in a former train station in Manchester.
Stood in the city where that same line had been intended to terminate, following not long after Boris Johnson had cancelled it to Leeds. As much as one may expect good news for the North when holding a conference here, I have learnt to not assume this will be the case.
The importance for the Labour government is not simply that they happen to be coming to Liverpool which is up North. It is that if they want growth, then the North is non-negotiable.
Rightly, the Chancellor has committed herself and the government to an Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor, but no such commitment has yet been made to the North.
The late Lord Prescott and George Osborne, not two political figures with a lot else they agreed on, fully understood the importance of the North to unlocking the UK’s growth potential and ensured their governments were fully committed to that aim.
There is still time for the Chancellor to make a similar commitment, but if we do not see progress by her Budget later this year I fear her mission to set the UK on a path to higher growth will be almost impossible.
If she needs inspiration to see what it possible, she need look no further than Rotherham, which has seen some of the highest productivity growth of any town in the country over the last two decades – but we need to scale that up across the whole of the North if the country is to escape its productivity malaise.
Unlike the South, we don’t need a new runway to make that happen. Manchester built a second runway more than 20 years ago, and its new long-haul terminal is nearly complete whilst in the capital the arguments on the merits of expansion have had to be made time and again.
The problem the North faces is the poor rail link to get there: one direct train from Leeds, and none from Sheffield or Bradford.
As YouGov recently highlighted, Northern Powerhouse Rail is also overwhelmingly popular nationally, not just here in the North. A northern economic corridor with dramatically better links between the northern cities and Manchester Airport could and should have been in the Chancellor's speech on Monday.
It would be far more impactful for generations to come than anything else which we may hear when she addresses the party faithful in the Hall.
Henri Murison is the chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.