After months of delay, the government has finally set out its plans for improving rail services in the North, pledging to spend £45bn over the coming decades.
Sir Keir Starmer said the investment will lead to more reliable commutes for travellers, more homes and more jobs.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves will make a speech in Leeds today where she will claim that the Government’s Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) plan will be “transformative” for the region.
But critics remain sceptical after Labour committed only £1.1bn in this Parliament to deliver the various rail schemes and many questions remain unanswered as to what will actually happen.
Here, The i Paper looks at five of the most important rail plans and assesses how likely they are to happen:
Improved lines in Yorkshire – 4/5
Probably the biggest winner out of the new NPR plan is Yorkshire. The Government says its investment will come in three stages, and phase one will be improving lines in and around cities such as Leeds, Sheffield and York.
This will mean electrification of routes where it has yet to happen, a new station at Bradford and improvements at others, such as Leeds, which is the worst in the country for delays.
Plans for northern rail upgrades have been divided into three phases, with no firm start date for phases 2 and 3A review commissioned by the mayors of York, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, and carried out by former Home Secretary Lord Blunkett, set out a programme that would need around £14bn of investment.
David Skaith, Labour’s mayor of York, claimed what the Government is offering is a “strong endorsement of the vision we set out”.
New Manchester to Liverpool line – 3/5
Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham and his counterpart in Liverpool, Steve Rotheram, lobbied hard for a new line between their cities to improve capacity, speed up journey times, and be a catalyst for growth.
Rishi Sunak’s government had promised £17bn towards the “LMR line” as part of the Network North plan published when the northern leg of HS2 to Manchester was axed in 2023. But Labour has refused to recommit to that funding since coming to power.
The new NPR plan promises that a new line will be built, but fails to put a figure on how much the Government will commit to it. Officials say figures will need to be finalised once further work to finalise the details has been carried out, but it will come from the total £45bn funding envelope.
The plan also fails to commit to a firm start date, only saying that the LMR line will happen as part of phase two once improvements in Yorkshire are complete.Crucially, the government has agreed that the LMR line will make use of the hybrid HS2 bill, which remains in Parliament and gives the powers to build a section of the railway between Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly.
This is the most expensive part of the route as it would be almost entirely underground. It has also been criticised by some, such as former government adviser Andrew Gilligan, because it is not the most direct route from Manchester to Liverpool.
But Burnham and other northern leaders have argued that Manchester Airport must be at the centre of the plan as it would bring millions more people within travelling distance of Britain’s third-biggest aviation hub.
Underground station at Manchester Piccadilly – 2/5
This has long been campaigned for by Burnham and other northern leaders, particularly those in the north-west of England.
They argue that there is little point in building new rail lines east of the Pennines and west from Manchester to Liverpool if they are forced to encounter Victorian infrastructure in and around Piccadilly.
Manchester’s congested rail corridor is already a major bottleneck for east-west travel as passenger trains often find themselves stuck behind rail freight.
The solution, according to Manchester’s leaders, is a state-of-the-art underground station which has capacity for local services and inter-city services running both east to west and north to south. And one that avoids clashes with rail freight.
Northern leaders have long warned of bottlenecks in rail capacity in and around Manchester Piccadilly station (Photo: Dominic Lipinski/Bloomberg/Getty)Whitehall officials have previously refused to endorse this plan, arguing that it is too expensive and that Manchester should make do with a surface expansion at Piccadilly.
The new NPR plan does not make any commitment on what the Government would do at Piccadilly, but Burnham is taking this as a win because it has not been refused.
Officials say they are willing to look at all station options around NPR and that it could be possible for city regions to make their own contributions to make them happen, either through business rates, land capture or even the newly-approved “tourist tax”.
Improvements in Hull and the North East – 1/5
Every time governments have laid out their plans for northern rail, the map tends to stop at Leeds or York and not go any further.
This time, Labour’s NPR plan does at least include both Hull and Newcastle. However, the graphic supplied says that all this means is that “NPR services continue on existing infrastructure” to these places.
There is a recommitment to opening the Leamside Line, a 21-mile rail corridor between Gateshead and County Durham, although this has been previously announced and will likely take decades to happen.
Leaders in Hull have been campaigning for the electrification of their rail line to Leeds for many years. It does not appear that this has been promised as part of the new NPR plan.
New Birmingham to Manchester line – 0/5
One of the most eye-catching promises of the new NPR plan also looks to be the least likely to happen.
Labour has said it is its “intention in the long term” to build a new rail line between Birmingham and Manchester – dubbed HS2-lite – to replace the section of HS2 which was cancelled by the previous government.
However, there is no new funding announced and it will only happen once all the other rail projects are completed in Liverpool, Manchester, Yorkshire and beyond.
Officials have said they will retain land and property acquired for HS2 beyond Birmingham, rather than sell it off as is set to happen on the eastern leg to Leeds, which was also cancelled.
But it is understood that the Government will allow the compulsory purchase powers which it was given for HS2, and would still be necessary to build any new railway line, to expire on 11 February.
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The High Speed Rail Group, which represents much of the rail industry, said it remains “concerned” that “the timescales for delivering this new line appear uncertain and potentially some decades away.”
They added: “We are also concerned that the Government does not intend to extend the land purchase powers between Birmingham and Crewe, which expire next month. It makes more sense to retain these legal powers whilst the Government develop a clear, costed plan for connections north beyond HS2.”
The Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA union), which represents rail workers, was even more scathing.
General Secretary Maryam Eslamdoust said: “This announcement seems to be long on aspiration but desperately short on delivery details.”
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