Integrated Rail Plan: North and Midlands

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

This integrated rail plan is in reality about backtracking on government promises to build the eastern leg of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail. The Government know that HS2 and full delivery of Northern Powerhouse Rail would have given a major boost to the economies of our northern cities, because that is what the construction and pending completion of HS2 have already done and will continue to do for the economy of the West Midlands and Birmingham in particular. Leeds and the local West Yorkshire economy will now be denied the full £54 billion of estimated economic benefits of their HS2 link, with Leeds becoming a less attractive venue than it would have been for new and expanding businesses. Northern Powerhouse Rail delivered in full, with a new high-speed line through Bradford, was also set to deliver an estimated £22 billion for northern economies. The integrated rail plan does not address the impact of backtracking on the eastern leg of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail on the economies of our northern cities and towns, and there was no government answer when I asked about it last Thursday.

Typically, this Government are now seeking to silence opposition to their watered-down plan, since Transport for the North, which is overseen by all the northern mayors and council leaders, has just been told that it will no longer be financed by central government to develop Northern Powerhouse Rail and that in future this work will be funded directly, and thus controlled directly, via Network Rail by the Department of Transport, a reflection of the Government’s centralising tendency and lack of enthusiasm for real devolution of power and decision-making.

The Government’s integrated rail plan, which incidentally says very little about rail freight at all, places great weight on the virtues of upgrades of existing lines and the time in which they can be completed and the costs incurred. In doing so, though, the rail plan and the Secretary of State fail to reflect the very different experience of recent major upgrades. The west coast main line was upgraded at a cost of £9 billion, nearly four times the original cost estimate of £2.5 billion. Despite costs ballooning nearly 400%, the upgrade still had to be reduced in scope from 140 mph top speed to 125 mph with moving block signalling, in-cab signalling, being abandoned; otherwise, the cost would have been up by nearly 600%. The project led to substantial upheaval to existing services over a period of years and was not completed until 2009, very late and 10 years after it started.

Work on the Great Western electrification commenced in June 2010 and was due to be completed in 2016-17, but was not completed until 2019-20. The project ran into major difficulties, causing repeated extensions to deadlines and costs to increase by more than 300%, to around £2.8 billion in 2018 from £874 million in 2013. Despite this dramatic increase in costs, the project still had to be scaled back to keep cost increases merely in excess of three times the original figure. Electrification from Didcot Parkway to Oxford, Cardiff to Swansea, Chippenham to Bath and Bristol Parkway to Bristol Temple Meads, as well as branches to Henley and Windsor, were also deferred indefinitely by the Government in November 2016, with the Cardiff to Swansea electrification being cancelled outright in July 2017.

The message is clear: upgrading routes is not as straightforward as the Government suggest. The hard evidence shows that costs will be very much higher than projected and the time taken to do the work a great deal longer than projected. Statements plucked out of the air about being able to deliver a watered-down version of what was promised a decade earlier than projected fly in the face of the facts and experience. Such statements also fly in the face of the Government’s own document, which indicates that the new lines on part of the watered-down Liverpool to Leeds route will not come into service until the 2040s—the same timescale within which the Prime Minister, in his foreword to the plan, says that high-speed lines under the original plan will have reached the east Midlands and Yorkshire.

Further, on costs, there is no breakdown of costings for each separate project within the plan, or a breakdown of any large figures within each separate project. There is also a further issue: the watered-down schemes outlined in the rail plan are dependent for delivery, on both projected capacity and speeds, on digital signalling. But I believe, perhaps mistakenly, that there is not yet a substantial tried and tested digital signalling scheme as envisaged by Secretary of State already in full operation. Indeed, people have so far been working on trying to develop such a scheme for more than 20 years. If there is a delay in the projected timescale for bringing such an as yet untried signalling development to fruition, even the watered-down schemes as projected in the rail plan will be severely compromised in respect of capacity, speed and timescale.

In the past decade, the north of England received £349 per person in transport spending, while London got £864. If the north had received the same level of spending as London, it would already have had £86 billion more since 2010. Yet this rail plan, worth £96 billion, some of which is in the south at the southern end of HS2, will take well into the 2040s at best to complete, considerably over two decades away. This plan, with its backtracking on previous pledges and reductions in previously stated future levels of expenditure, continues, not addresses, regional investment inequalities. So much for the Government’s levelling up and delivering HS2 in full, including the eastern leg, and Northern Powerhouse Rail.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I recall a particularly funny episode of “Yes Minister” in which the Prime Minister asked Jim Hacker to produce an integrated transport plan. It was called “The Bed of Nails”, and I was reminded of that episode over the weekend as I watched the Secretary of State valiantly trying and failing to sell this plan as a success for the north of England. It takes a lot of ingenuity to produce a plan that almost doubles the time it will take to get, for example, from Birmingham to York, and still call it an improvement on previous plans.

Despite the Secretary of State’s sleight of hand, the plan has not been well received. The Government have managed to unite the elected mayors of the north, the chambers of commerce in Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Birmingham, east Lancashire, Doncaster, the east Midlands and even London, the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, Conservative MPs for northern constituencies and the Conservative chair of the Transport Committee in opposing and criticising the Government’s plan.

Not surprisingly, one of the critics was Transport for the North, and for that it has been stripped of its powers, which seems a very strange approach to levelling up. I join the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, in asking the Minister to explain why control of the Northern Powerhouse Rail project will now lie solely with central government—what is it that makes Ministers so sure that they know better than the people of the north about what they need in relation to railways?

The most high-profile decision was, of course, to truncate HS2 by abandoning the eastern leg. Those cities that had expected to be directly linked to a new 21st-century rail line have developed investment plans predicated on that and expected an economic boost along those lines. They now have to start again following a massive no-confidence vote by the Government. As the noble Lord said, transport spend per head is scarcely more than one-third of the size that it is in London. In her answer to me last Thursday, the Minister admitted that abandoning HS2 and reducing the Northern Powerhouse Rail plans

“saves the taxpayer billions of pounds.”—[Official Report, 18/11/21; col. 407.]

I suggest to the Minister that this approach is totally unacceptable. What do the Government plan to do to redress the balance now that their levelling-up promises to the north of England lie in tatters?

HS2 was always as much about capacity as speed. The Government are going instead for a patchwork of schemes, with short stretches of electrification. Digital signalling, which has long been promised, and longer platforms for longer trains will create some extra capacity but it does not compare with what a whole new railway would do. The Government promised to electrify 13,000 kilometres of railway by 2050 and so far have done 2.2% of that. So we are 235 years behind schedule. I ask the Minister: after all the stretches referred to in the plan have been completed, what percentage will we be on?

Finally, one of the reasons for building a new line is that the upgrading of existing lines is enormously disruptive. As a veteran of 10 years of Great Western’s electrification, I can attest to that. What calculations have the Government made of the cost of disruption for the lines they propose to upgrade?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for their considered responses to the integrated rail plan. I too had the opportunity, over the weekend, to read the documents in detail and consider the sorts of questions I might face today. Actually, noble Lords have not disappointed so far in the issues that they have raised—and I accept that they feel very strongly about this.

Having read the documents and considered this more carefully, I think the integrated rail plan is an elegant solution. We had a very outdated plan, the old plan, which did not properly take into account some developments, particularly from the national transport bodies, notably Transport for the North and Northern Powerhouse Rail, and Midlands Engine Rail, Midlands Connect and the Midlands Rail Hub. None of them had a proper look-in in the plans. We saw that costs were rising and that the whole thing did not fit well together, so it was absolutely right for the Government to go back, look at the plans, set them all out and consider what we are actually trying to achieve. The goal is not to build new railways; it is just something that enables people to get from A to B more quickly, more frequently and at a cheaper cost. That is what we are trying to do.

How we choose to do that is a combination of stretches of new railway, as noble Lords know, and some upgrades to existing railways. That is a very elegant situation that comes at a lower cost to the taxpayer. I will not and see no reason to apologise for that at all. It also happens much more quickly than it would otherwise, so we need to take a step back. There are a lot of winners here. I would like to be living in Nottingham, quite frankly; people there are going to have a great time. Good old Derby will have direct access to HS2, which it was nowhere close to prior to this. Also, all the places along the Midlands main line will get electrification and have more reliable journeys now. They did not even get a look-in in the old plans.

We have taken a more considered approach to the system as a whole. I accept that life has changed slightly for Leeds, but Leeds is also benefiting from this. We have said that we will spend £100 million on looking at how to get HS2 to Leeds. We will look at whether the current station can absorb the additional capacity and we will finally start work on the West Yorkshire mass transit system. This is great news for Leeds, so I do not share the doom and gloom of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about its economic future. Actually, having a train line that goes to Manchester is just one of the things that people in Leeds might want; they might also want to travel around their own city on a mass transit system. I think we have been able to help Leeds in this regard. The impact on economies will be set out in the business cases for all the different schemes, as we go forward.

On TfN and its change of role, this is not at all unusual within the Department for Transport. We have a good relationship with TfN and it has an important role in providing us with statutory advice. However, the Northern Powerhouse Rail programme will be in the Government’s major projects portfolio and it requires clear accountability to the Secretary of State. Therefore, the client will be the Department for Transport, but that does not cut out Transport for the North. It has a joint sponsorship role, and again it is important that it can offer advice and knows what is going on with the project. In terms of delivery, however, it must be accountable to the Secretary of State to make sure that we keep things moving as we need to.

There was a comment about the Government not being a fan of devolution, on which I beg to differ. The city region sustainable transport settlements have committed £5.7 billion to our major cities. That is truly transport devolution on a large scale.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, came up with a litany of delays that had happened previously. I do not disagree that sometimes large transport infrastructure projects suffer from delays. None of us involved in transport likes delays but sometimes they happen. However, I am not entirely sure why they would not then happen to elements of HS2. Given that the previous full “Y” going all the way up was not going to be delivered until the mid-2040s, my goodness, we could be looking to the mid-2060s before that was delivered then, had it been delayed. I am not sure that that is necessarily a reason for not liking the Government’s plans.

On the issue of disruption, all transport infrastructure projects are disruptive. We know that. However, the approach taken by this IRP will cause less disruption that previous plans would have. For example, the HS2 eastern leg in full would have caused significant disruption to the motorway network. It would have crossed it 13 times. I am the Roads Minister—that disruption would have been quite challenging. We know that enhancements to existing lines will ease bottlenecks and make rail services more reliable. We will work very closely with the rail industry to minimise disruption as the schemes are developed and delivered.

I turn now to the issue of digital signalling. If I may, I will write on this issue so I can provide the most up-to-date information that I have.

The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, asked what percentage will be electrified when this is all finished. In my brief I have the figure of 75%, which I want to check. It feels right—but you think, okay, we are going to go from quite a small percentage to 75%. We are going to be electrifying hundreds of miles of railway line, so this probably is right but, again, I will write to 100% confirm that number. This is a huge electrification programme, as I am sure the noble Baroness will understand.

Let us turn to money. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, mentioned it and so did the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. This is the sort of thing that I get a little bit confused by. We are in a strange parallel universe where it matters only how much you are spending rather than what you are spending it on. That strikes me as bizarre. People are saying to me “But you are not spending this money on this railway line,”. No, but we are providing more benefits to more people, more quickly for less money. Surely that is a good thing.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that I believe that the leader of the Opposition has in mind to establish something called the value for money office, should he ever become Prime Minister. He may well think that that is a very good idea. But I say to the noble Lord that, if he had the Government’s integrated rail plan at £96 billion—providing some pretty good service uplifts and some good improvements in journey times—versus the previous outdated plans costing £185 billion, and if he were to give those to this new-fangled value for money office, I wonder which one it would choose.