Senior Tory suggests the North doesn't have enough people to warrant rail investment
A senior Tory has suggested that there are not enough people in the North to warrant investment in rail infrastructure.
Lord Moylan, the Conservatives’ transport spokesperson in the House of Lords, has said that the “North has to take a bit more control of its own thinking and be more imaginative about some of these solutions”.
The former deputy chairman of Transport for London was speaking at a fringe at the Tory conference in Birmingham on rail nationalisation.
He was responding to a question from Clare Hayward, chair of the Convention of the North, who asked what would come next after the cancellation of HS2 and the delays to Northern Powerhouse Rail.
NPR, the planned high-speed line from Liverpool to Leeds, Hull and Sheffield, with a new station in Bradford, was put on hold after Rishi Sunak cancelled the northern leg of HS2 in Manchester last year.
Greater transport connectivity is widely seen as being key to improving growth across Yorkshire and the rest of the North.
However, Lord Moylan appeared to question whether the population warranted serious rail investment.
He said “railway investment works where you have an awful lot of people concentrated in one place”, citing London.
The Tory transport spokesperson continued: “That gives you lots and lots of passengers, which justifies the system and makes it work.
“There needs to be a better argument about the North, because there’s just that question of critical mass which the North is constantly going to run into and needs to be addressed.”
He added that there has to be “more imaginative thinking”, instead of “how government is going to do this for us”.
Greater Manchester and West Midland mayors Andy Burnham and Richard Parker recently announced plans to replace the northern leg of HS2 with a privately funded high-speed rail line.