The road back to prosperity

THE only serious criticism that can be made of the plan to revive the region’s decrepit transport network is that such a far-sighted scheme was not developed many years earlier.

Had plans been put together during the boom years for this kind of major transport overhaul, with a similar financial arrangement established between Whitehall and local government, the region would have been in a much better position to combat the recession and might by now be mounting a serious economic recovery instead of stagnating as London and the South-East power ahead.

After all, for most of the last three decades, it has been recognised that Yorkshire’s industrial potential was being throttled by congested roads and inadequate air and rail connections and that pioneering projects such as the M62 motorway were victims of their own success, increasingly unable to cope with the flow of commerce that they had generated.

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As it is, the new scheme, predicated on the City Deal agreement between the Government and the Leeds city-region, will not provide an immediate escape route from the present economic predicament. But what it does offer is real hope that the days of inadequate transport in one of the major regions of England will soon be over once and for all.

For, while the immediate £1bn scheme is limited to West Yorkshire and York – including new link roads and bypasses, a bus interchange in York, an extra carriageway to Leeds Bradford Airport and a new M62 junction – it provides a blueprint for further City Deals in South and East Yorkshire.

Indeed, there are also plans for larger, regional projects, including the electrification of all Yorkshire’s major rail routes, and the hope of a so-called super-council involving the leaders of each West Yorkshire authority as well as York and with the Local Enterprise Partnership also represented.

It remains to be seen, of course, exactly how all this will work. But there is the hope, clearly, of a productive, flexible relationship between local authorities in the region (rather than a return to the rigidly tiered, overly bureaucratic days of county councils), of co-operation instead of conflict with central government in Whitehall and, most important of all, of this region never again lagging behind the rest of Britain because of woefully inadequate investment in transport.