Northern Powerhouse Rail is designed to address structural weaknesses holding the region back - Mark Reynolds
Last week’s announcement on Northern Powerhouse Rail marks a major milestone for the North and for the UK economy as a whole. For businesses across the North, the challenge Northern Powerhouse Rail is responding to is a familiar one.
Northern cities are home to world-class universities, fast-growing firms and major industrial clusters, but they remain too poorly connected to work like London does with access to a huge pool of talent. Here in Yorkshire the region is held back by slow, unreliable and infrequent trains, limiting access to jobs, holding back productivity and making it harder for businesses to invest with confidence. Industrialists know talent from Manchester won’t readily travel to Bradford, nor even from Sheffield to Leeds.
Northern Powerhouse Rail is designed to address that structural weakness. By improving capacity, frequency and reliability between the North’s major cities, it has the potential to enable people to access a wider range of jobs, employers to draw from even neighbouring cities, and firms to collaborate and grow across city region boundaries.
The government’s intention to develop a rail line between Birmingham and the North via Manchester is also welcome. Strengthening capacity between the Midlands and the North will, via Northern Powerhouse Rail, benefit Yorkshire as much as the North West.
For business, this matters in practical ways. At Mace Consult, which received investment last year from Goldman Sachs, the firm and our clients who are many of the world’s leading, most successful businesses need to be able to work across multiple locations without friction. When connectivity is poor, growth is constrained; when it is reliable and frequent, productivity follows. This is what turns a collection of proud cities with different football teams but shared economic destiny into a productive Northern Growth Corridor.
Seen in that context, these proposals show a shift away from make do and mend towards a network with the scale to support long-term sustainable growth. In particular, the inclusion of a new through station in Bradford city centre in the first phase is a significant step.
Just like the 2012 Olympics where my colleagues and I helped deliver regeneration in East London, this is a once in a generation opportunity. We can change the destiny of communities here in Yorkshire in the same way the transformation of Stratford has changed lives across London for generations to come.
As Co-Chair of both the Construction Leadership Council and the Construction Skills Mission Board, I have consistently stressed that major infrastructure succeeds only when it is underpinned by a strong commitment to invest, clarity of pipeline and effective alignment across industry and government.
Privately funded housing and regeneration will come forward even before new infrastructure opens, including in Bradford’s Southern gateway. To deliver that effectively and leverage that investment, we need a joined up approach to supporting and scaling the supply chain. We need focus to get a well-defined, well costed project, meaning we can match the success of TransPennine Route Upgrade which remains on time, on budget.
While it is still early days, this announcement was an example of the government beginning to offer that clarity, and it should be celebrated as such.
From the Southern Gateway site to wider city-centre housing and office developments across Leeds and Sheffield, investors across the UK and around the world will be paying attention. From an industry perspective, the importance of this announcement lies not only in what is being built, but in how it is being taken forward. The commitment to clear phasing and a funded development programme allows delivery partners to engage early, manage risk more effectively and ultimately drive better outcomes for the taxpayer.
Crucially, collaboration between government, metro mayors and local partners creates the conditions for projects of this scale to be delivered efficiently and at pace. That combination of clear phasing, funded development and coordinated leadership is what signals a genuinely delivery-focused approach, rather than another cycle of stop-start decision-making.
There is still much work to do. Northern Powerhouse Rail will need a combination of locally raised taxes and revenue as well as central government money, but the powers to do this – like retaining some of the employers national insurance paid locally – are just not possible currently.
Building on the lessons from the hugely successful Elizabeth Line in London, it is clear we need more Mayoral and local council control of tax revenue and tools so that projects from a new station in Rotherham to the expansion of Leeds station are not just all dependent on central government. After too many years of uncertainty and delay, this announcement will hopefully finally mark the start of the delivery phase.
Now the task is to maintain momentum, and build with confidence.
Mark Reynolds CBE is group executive chairman of Mace, co-chair of the Construction Leadership Council, co-chair of the Construction Skills Mission Board and vice chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.