Integrated Rail Plan: Northern Powerhouse Area

Lord Rosser Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley for securing this debate. He asked a number of questions of the Government, to which I too will be interested to hear the answers.

We will hear from the Government about the reduced amount of money they now intend to invest in our railway network as a result of their broken promises—only they will not describe it that way. Instead, they will portray it as a brilliant new programme of investment which will deliver more than the original programme they had repeatedly promised. Try telling that to the people of Bradford, for example, as the integrated rail plan does not include the new high-speed trans-Pennine route between Leeds and Manchester via Bradford, which is a key component of the Northern Powerhouse Rail project. Try telling it to the people of Leeds, who, after 10 years of investment and planning based on the Government’s clear—but now reneged on—proposal to bring HS2 to their city have, insultingly, been left with only a government statement in the plan about looking further into the most effective way of running HS2 trains to Leeds.

If the reduced rail investment programme was actually going to deliver more than the programme repeatedly promised by the Prime Minister—which it will not—it begs the question of why it has taken this Government more than 11 years to find that out. If the answer is that the costs of HS2 have risen during that time, that is simply an admission by the Government that they lack the ability to exercise any meaningful control over costs, as happened with the Great Western main line electrification, which, like HS2 now, was cut back and left unfinished.

As the Government cannot control costs today, they will be unable to control future costs even of their now greatly reduced rail investment programme. The integrated rail plan was supposed to present a blueprint for how HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and trans-Pennine upgrades could all be integrated and delivered in parallel. We now have a watered-down HS2, a failure to deliver Northern Powerhouse Rail at all, and money to deliver upgrades that were needed not instead of but alongside the high-speed lines.

The upgrades will not provide the capacity the network needs, including for local services and rail freight, to become more reliable and efficient; will not create the infrastructure required to attract business investment; and will result in significant disruption to existing services while the upgrade work is undertaken, which would not be the case with the construction of new high-speed lines. Not all the investment left in the integrated rail plan is even new, timeframes are vague, and it appears that some new line sections may well be delivered later than under the original HS2 and NPR proposals.

By trading off fast strategic national rail links and higher-quality local ones against one another and prioritising short-term fixes and cost savings, the truncated plan is likely to fail to meet future demand and deliver the social, environmental and economic outcomes promised under the previous HS2 and NPR proposals. Those projects were about boosting the northern and Midland economies, as HS2 is already doing for the Midlands; closing the transport investment gap with London; rebalancing the economy and levelling up, creating thousands and thousands of new jobs; connecting millions more people and businesses in our major towns and cities in our industrial heartlands; and taking car and lorry trips off our roads to help address the climate emergency.

The truncated rail plan, which will also lead to the sidelining of Transport for the North, as my noble friend Lord Berkeley said, is driven by those in government who want simply to achieve the lowest capital cost they think they can get away with. Instead, as my noble friend Lady Blake of Leeds said, we should be looking at the whole-life benefits of major projects and programmes—economic, social and environmental —as the major cities in the north, north-east and Midlands were doing with their investment and planning while they still believed the Prime Minister’s now worthless promises on HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail. If there were any doubts before, there can be none now: the Prime Minister’s slogans about levelling up and building back better are just that—slogans—and nothing more.