Bradford stop being dropped from Northern Powerhouse Rail plans - report

The Politico London Playbook has seen details of the plans, which are due to be announced in Parliament today and reports Bradford will not get a stop on the Northern Powerhouse Rail route, as the plans originally envisioned.

The report states the route between Leeds and Manchester will be half made up of a new high speed line, with the other half consisting of upgrades to existing track.

"The original proposal consisted of a new line the whole way, running through Bradford, which Playbook can confirm now doesn’t get a stop," the report states.

It comes hours after Boris Johnson confirmed in The Yorkshire Post that the Eastern leg of HS2 will not reach Leeds. It is expected that the line will now see trains run from Birmingham to the East Midlands before joining existing track up to Sheffield - meaning HS2 trains will get to Yorkshire but the physical line will not.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps is expected to officially announce the details in Parliament at around 10.30am today.

Lord O’Neill, former Conservative minister and vice chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, told Times Radio that “Bradford is being excluded” after it was revealed it was expected the HS2 extension plans to Yorkshire would be scaled back.

It is expected the HS2 extension will not serve Leeds and Sheffield.

Lord O’Neill said: “It seems like a strange political and economic risk-reward calculation here because from what the team at the Powerhouse Partnership have figured out, all of this on that part of it would only save less than £4 billion out of what was previously £39 billion.

“So, 10% saving to disappoint millions of people around the north and, crucially, people in red wall seats and their MPs.”

Lord O’Neill said he thought the Government’s motivation behind making changes to the extension of HS2 into Yorkshire is “driven by cost”.

He added that the decision is “clearly sad” for Bradford, and added: “The Prime Minister’s making a big thing about how they’re going to do something on the Bradford to Leeds line to cut it to 12 minutes, but you know I sometimes call the Northern Powerhouse concept rather inelegantly ManchesterLeedspool, because at the end of the day, the distance of Manchester to any of these places is less than the length of the central Tube line.”

Lord O’Neill said the North is being left out and “it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense”.

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