Rail Investment and Integrated Rail Plan

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My colleagues and I were extremely disappointed with the decision to scrap Northern Powerhouse Rail between Leeds and Manchester. Although the IRP, or, as I like to call it, the bus replacement service, has some things to like —we will be constructive about them where they meet our aims for Yorkshire—the impact of the loss of high-speed rail will have ripple effects through every community in our region.

A lot of people do not fully realise that high-speed rail infrastructure, on dedicated lines, is not solely about getting to London or the midlands more quickly. It is about releasing capacity so that local lines can run effective local services and we can ensure the future of our network, the growth of our region and the environment around us. Northern Powerhouse Rail promised three things: faster services on a dedicated line, new trains and new stations. It promised an all-electric dedicated line between Bradford and Manchester. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) has already made the point about the short-sightedness of not connecting the people of the UK’s youngest city with the opportunities that that would have brought. Instead, the Government have written in the IRP:

“We will also upgrade and electrify”—

I just want to say that many people here do not understand what “upgrade” means. It does not mean getting something new. If I put a new stereo in my car, it is not a new car; it is just a car with a new stereo in it—

“the line between Leeds and Bradford giving a non-stop journey time which could be as low as 12 minutes.”

That sounds good at first glance, but without the dedicated line, there are knock-on effects that are not printed on the tin.

There are currently two lines that run from Leeds to Bradford. One takes 20 minutes, stopping twice, and the other takes 24 minutes, stopping four times. Both those lines are at maximum frequency. There is no way, on the current line, to meet the 12-minute target to Bradford without sacrificing local services and local stops. I have constituents living between those stops who do not feel that the cancellation of NPR affects them, but when residents who commute to Leeds or Bradford by rail find that their service will be cut to meet the Leeds-Bradford target, what will they do? The answer is probably to increase car use. We have been promised new trains, but new trains are not a replacement for new services. More than that, they will work only on electrified lines, which do not extend beyond Bradford westbound through Huddersfield or northbound to Preston.

[Naz Shah]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the commute from Bradford to Leeds, or from Bradford to Manchester, puts more cars on the road and does not help us to meet our COP26 obligations?

[Alex Sobel]

Absolutely. Only NPR will get people on those routes on to the train.

Most concerning is the broken promise of new stations in Leeds and in Bradford. Faster and more regular services require more platform space, and Leeds is already at capacity. Without extra capacity, will my constituents who use the Harrogate line have their services cut? I would like the rail Minister to answer that question. On the electrification of the Harrogate line, the recent Network Rail transport decarbonisation network strategy includes a recommendation for electrification between Leeds and Harrogate. Will that come forward?

On Northern Powerhouse Rail, we have been sold a pup, but I also want to address the problem of getting to a train station in the first place. Otley in my constituency was cut from the train line by Beeching. Our Mayor, Tracy Brabin, has an ambitious and achievable plan for a mass transit system to reach Otley, linking it to Leeds and Bradford, where we thought it would join NPR. The Government committed to that scheme in their manifesto in 2019. The Prime Minister said in this Chamber:

“We will remedy the scandal that Leeds is the largest city in western Europe without light rail or a metro.”—[Official Report, 19 December 2019; Vol. 669, c. 47.

However, trams are built not on the hopes and dreams of a whimsical Prime Minister, but on cold, hard cash.

The Prime Minister has failed to show us the money. All the Government have committed to is £200 million, of which they have said £100 million should be used to work out how to get HS2 trains from Sheffield to Leeds—something that the DFT, not the West Yorkshire metro Mayor, should be doing—and that falls well short of the £3 billion required for us to build the tram scheme. The people of West Yorkshire have been short-changed for far too long. What the Prime Minister has offered is not levelling up, but pushing us down a hill. He is indeed northern infrastructure’s grand old duke of York, marching us up to the top of the hill and right back down again.