Mass Transit: West Yorkshire

Katie White Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Katie White (Leeds North West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairwomanship, Ms Jardine.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) for securing this important and timely debate. After years of waiting, we are finally getting a mass transit network worthy of a great world city, thanks to the Government’s support for West Yorkshire transport and the tireless efforts of our Labour Mayor, Tracy Brabin. This investment must benefit everyone, including my constituents in Leeds North West. Let us make sure there are no delays in moving from phase 1 to phase 2, establishing strong connections across our region.

Leeds Bradford airport is welcoming thousands of travellers this summer with a new terminal, offering a more comfortable start to their holidays, but it remains poorly served by public transport and has no proper rail link to the city centre and communities. As we embrace mass transit, we must seize the opportunities to connect the airport to the network, ensuring that the Weaver network is ready for take-off with no delays.

Beyond those large-scale projects, our communities need reliable, affordable bus services, as my hon. Friend said. Towns and villages such as Otley and Pool-in-Wharfedale deserve fast, frequent connections, and those heading to Horsforth—recently and rightly voted one of the best places to live in the UK—should not have to rely on taxis for a night out. That is why I support the moves by the Government and the combined authority to bring our buses back into public ownership, and I will back national and local efforts to make that happen.

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[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)]

It is very good to see you in the Chair, Ms Jardine. As everyone else has done, I congratulate the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) on securing this debate.

West Yorkshire and the city of Leeds have long been underserved by transport connections; that is common ground across this Chamber. Research from the Centre for Cities in 2022 found that just 38% of the population can reach the city centre within 30 minutes by public transport. That is a very low percentage for a city the size of Leeds.

As the former Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities made clear in his 2024 policy paper, that leads to below-average productivity in the area, and a critical catalyst for improvement must be better transport connections. The hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley was also right to allude to a long history of promises, half promises, schemes and plans to improve transport in Leeds, going back many decades. He was generous enough to say that it was a failure of Governments of multiple different colours.

I will go back just to the 2000s, when there was the supertram proposal, which the hon. Member might remember. It was a 17-mile system with 50 stations, but it was cancelled by Alistair Darling in 2005 because of cost overruns. In the interests of time, I will not read out the juicy quote from the leader of Leeds Council, but I am sure the hon. Member is familiar with it. In 2007, that proposal was replaced by the bus rapid transport scheme with FTR. That had some of the benefits of the supertram, but with lower initial capital costs, and it was replaced in 2012 by Wright StreetCars. Also in 2012, the trolleybus network proposal was approved by the Government. The scheme was allocated £173 million of public money to be in operation by 2018. From memory, it involved two park and rides and a bus system into the city centre. That, in its turn, was dropped in 2016—again, because of cost overruns and delays.

Then we jump forward to 2021, to the West Midlands combined authority and the mass transit scheme with light rail and tram-trains, or bus rapid transport. I am pleased to say that in 2023, it was given the go-ahead by the Conservative Government of the time, and £2.5 billion was allocated for the mass transit system, funded in full for Leeds and West Yorkshire by the Secretary of State’s predecessor Mark Harper. That was a firm commitment supported by the Treasury at the time.

On last week’s announcement by the Chancellor of £2.1 billion for the West Yorkshire mass transit scheme, I can see how the constituents of the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley might feel a little sceptical—they have been burned more than once. The plan now is to get the spades in the ground in 2028. It is almost as good as the previous Conservative Government’s plan, which was to get spades in the ground in 2027. The number is remarkably similar to what was then Network North policy.

It is worth looking at the numbers. In 2023, it was announced that £2.115 billion would be allocated, so it was a bit of a surprise that last week it was £2.1 billion. The Chancellor has knocked off 15 million quid, but it is absolutely a re-announcement of existing policy.

[Katie White]

Does the hon. Member agree that although those announcements were made, like many other announcements, such as those on hospitals, they were never funded, and so the Treasury never allocated the money to them. He is right that there was a similar intention, but we are fulfilling on the delivery of that intention.

[Jerome Mayhew]

The answer is that this is spending from 2026 to 2031, so of course we do not have the allocation in 2023. We will have it in 2026, however, and it is part of the Government funding process. If the hon. Lady asks me where that money is coming from, it is from the savings made through the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2. In rail terms, that was £19.6 billion.