Northern Powerhouse Rail concerns show we’re incapable of delivering a major infrastructure project on time and to budget in this country - Jayne Dowle
Way back in January, which seems like a century ago, Sir Keir Starmer promised to revolutionise rail travel across the North of England through the launch of Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR).
He spoke as Chancellor Rachel Reeves committed £1.1bn for development and design work for NPR, originally conceived as a high-speed railway linking Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool.
Reeves said NPR would bring us a “turn up and go” railway across the North, mirroring London’s transport network.
By the 2040s, she pledged there would be a new line from Liverpool to Manchester into West Yorkshire, with simpler upgrades across the region being completed in the early 2030s.
First announced in 2014, various iterations have diminished the ambitious plan to straddle the Pennines with a super-modern, super-fast rail service delivering economic benefits across Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside.
Eventual confirmed details of the project, which had been shrouded in secrecy/indecision since Conservative PM Rishi Sunak scrapped the final Northern leg of HS2’s high speed link in autumn 2023, included improving connections on railway lines between Sheffield and Leeds, Leeds and York, and Leeds and Bradford, starting in the 2030s, plus a second phase involving a new route between Liverpool and Manchester. Not exactly the London Transport clone promised by the government.
Confusingly, improvements are already underway as part of the Transpennine Route Upgrade, delivering better-equipped stations for towns including Batley, Dewsbury and Huddersfield and track enhancement. Travellers facing ongoing station closures and being diverted onto rail replacement buses can be forgiven for already feeling weary regarding the price of progress.
And now, a damning report from parliamentary watchdog the Public Accounts Committee warns that NPR risks repeating the failures of HS2 and questions how the £45bn total Treasury budget will deliver a long-awaited rail network connecting cities on both sides of the Pennines.
After years of campaigning by Northern MPs, local leaders and commuter groups it was widely regarded that what the north of England needed more than any high-speed link to London was better connectivity within itself.
That the city of Hull, a key port, centre for the renewables industry and with a major university was left out of the East-West plans was irksome. But it turns out that for Northern commuters, this is only one problem NPR fails to address.
Sheffield South East MP Clive Betts, deputy chair of the PAC sounds an ominous warning.
“But the spectre of HS2 hangs over Northern Powerhouse Rail,” Betts told reporters. “Our Committee has heard troubling echoes of the same mistakes in loose governance that HS2 made early on, and so much of the project remains almost impressionistic, 12 years on.”
The work of the PAC has rarely been more important. It turns out that HS2 has actually been brought on board to develop NPR’s own plans. As Betts says, “as HS2 has been a casebook example of how not to run a major project, so their involvement in NPR does not fill us with confidence.”
He is also questioning how the Government could be confident of the project fitting within the Treasury’s £45bn total funding cap, when sections have not been fully scoped out, likening the approach to “putting a roof on a house before the foundations are even laid”.
It is beyond belief that those in charge of NPR at the Department of Transport have seemingly paid no heed to the fiasco of HS2. This massively scaled back scheme, which should have operated from London to Manchester and Leeds, is currently running at more than three times its original 2011 budget, £32.7bn.
It’s estimated that it will have cost £100bn by the time trains eventually run from London Euston to Birmingham sometime between 2040 and 2043. It was supposed to be operational this year, 2026.
If NPR really is learning nothing from the mistakes of HS2, many of us reading this will be dead by the time it’s finished, and those of us who remain will be flying everywhere in driverless cars.
The stalling - and serious concerns - surrounding NPR show once again, this country is incapable of delivering a major infrastructure project on time and to budget.
We northerners can be forgiven for cynicism. We were told NPR would be the consolation prize for no HS2. If Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham is serious about giving the North equality with London and the South, he needs to flex his muscles, fast.