Integrated Rail Plan: Northern Powerhouse Area

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

I agree with the objectives of the integrated rail plan but, as far as the east and north-east of England are concerned, the plan fails to meet them. HS2 was never going to do much for the north-east and now, cut back, it will do virtually nothing for it. The plan leaves the east coast main line, in the words of the Railway Magazine, as the “withered arm” of the system.

In the plan, there are infrastructure improvements to the east coast line, but lack of capacity remains severely limiting to passenger and freight services for years to come. Why is there no commitment to reopening the Leamside line in County Durham? That would solve a significant capacity problem and allow for further development of local services. The report says that

“the case for re-opening the Leamside route would be best considered as part of any future city region settlement”.

What settlement? What city region? What plans do the Government have to bring this forward, and why would it not have been better to include this project in the integrated plan? In this respect, it is a disintegrated plan.

A further consequence of not doing enough to increase line capacity is that improvements to London services, and to cross-country and trans-Pennine ones, are dependent on robbing Peter to pay Paul—in other words, reducing services from some stations to speed up or accommodate more services from Edinburgh to London. The report says that journey times from London to York, the north-east and Edinburgh will be reduced by around 25 minutes “subject to stopping patterns”. We know what that means, because we saw it in LNER’s draft timetable, now delayed to 2023. It means reducing services and lengthening journey times from some stations, such as Berwick and Darlington—the very opposite of levelling up.

It appears that preparation for service reductions is already being made by LNER, with a major reduction in travel centre staffing hours and consequent redundancies. It is a very odd time to be doing this, not only in advance of decisions on the integrated rail plan but with the planned handover of responsibility for station staff from LNER to Great British Railways. They should surely leave decisions such as that until that transfer has taken place.

All the maps in the integrated rail plan show the east coast main line petering out north of Newcastle, ignoring the existence of Alnmouth and Berwick. That is a sad symbol for a serious weakness in the plan. In his introduction to the plan, Grant Shapps talks of a

“modern network for the whole country, benefiting small towns alongside big cities sooner than previous proposals”.

It does not look like that from the small town of Berwick, which is the real access point for the whole of the eastern borders, or from the cities of eastern England, especially Newcastle and Sunderland.

HS2, as planned, was primarily of benefit to Birmingham and the north-west, and that is even more the case since the eastern arm part of the plan was chopped back. While the north-west may benefit, on the eastern side of England we will still not even have adequate linkage to the area whose prosperity might well be improved by faster rail services. We will not be part of that, and this is not going to achieve levelling up.