Integrated Rail Plan: Northern Powerhouse Area

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased that we can have a quick debate about the integrated rail plan this afternoon. My question relates to the capacity and regional capability contained in the plan, particularly for the east-west areas of the north and the Midlands.

I am grateful to the Minister for arranging a Zoom call this morning with Andrew Stephenson MP, the Minister for HS2. We had a useful discussion. I now realise that the IRP appears to be a cut-down version of HS2, with some welcome electrification on the Midland main line and the trans-Pennine route, but which appears not to deal with the capacity issues and the priorities for east-west connectivity, particularly for Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Hull.

Therefore, it did not really surprise me when I received a copy of the letter sent from the chair of Transport for the North to the Secretary of State, dated 26 November. It starts:

“I am writing on behalf of the Transport for the North Board to express our collective disappointment and dismay at the inadequacy of the Integrated Rail Plan; the plan as proposed is unacceptable to the North.”


That is a fairly strong statement from a regional authority. One of the issues it goes into is that the plan fails to deal with infrastructure constraints, particularly around Leeds and Manchester, saying that

“the plan is the wrong solution for the whole of the North and does not deliver the long-term transformation required to level up the North’s economy”.

I shall not go on, as it is a very long letter, but it also mentions that Bradford is left out, despite being the seventh largest local authority area in England by population.

I share Transport for the North’s vision to improve the network and make it as good as the network we have in the south-east around London. One can compare against the routes through the capital, Thameslink and Crossrail, once it opens, which serve dozens of routes on each side for seamless journeys. I would give the time of all those journeys, but I do not think we know them. That is what is particularly missing in terms of capacity across the Pennines and east-west services, including from Birmingham to Derby and Nottingham. In particular, there is a lack of not just through services but local services, connecting many of the smaller towns on the way. I do not know whether that matters to the Government, but it should.

I have one particular concern about Manchester, where the plan is to expand the existing planned HS2 station, so that all trains coming on the line reverse before going across the Pennines to Leeds. On page 65, the report justifies having terminus stations by saying that there are many in Europe, for example in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Zürich, Milan and Rome. It fails to say that all those stations were built probably over 100 years ago, when tunnels were less easy to build. It is also wrong, because the German Government and the German railway company are actually building a through tunnel underneath Stuttgart station. What the Government are proposing is old-fashioned—so be it.

As I said, I welcome the electrification of the Midland main line and the trans-Pennine route. That is a good idea but I point out that a small piece of the HS2 line now planned between Derby and Birmingham is, I think, costed at £11 billion when it would have cost just £2.5 billion to electrify the existing line. The biggest missing issue is that there is nothing in the report about improving the many secondary lines and services in the regions. It is good that Leeds is promised a metro service but I wonder how many decades that will take to come. It is a very good idea, if and when it happens.

On the costs, £96 billion is quoted in the document; it appears that the Government are including HS2 and Network Rail costs in this. It is my calculation that HS2 phases 1 and 2a are going to cost £83 billion to complete. While that has come from whistleblowers and my own estimation, it leaves just £9 billion for the rest of the project, which I hope is wrong. I have to question how much money matters to the Treasury. Many noble Lords will have read an article in the Guardian—I think it was on Monday this week—which said that the Department for Transport was requiring all train operators to prepare plans to cut costs by at least 10%. That is quite critical at this time, when nobody really knows what the forecast of future passengers might be. Has it asked HS2 to do the same? That might be a good thing. With all this, there seems to be very little money left for upgrades, electrification and capacity enhancement because it is all going on HS2.

The other interesting thing is: who will be building and developing all these things? In a series of Written Answers that I received this week, it seems that: Network Rail will be told to upgrade existing lines with help from HS2 to get trains into Leeds; HS2 is going to be building phase 2A and bits in the West Midlands; and there may be a new line for Northern Powerhouse Rail—we are not quite sure where, but I think it stops somewhere at the summit of the Pennines. Where does Great British Railways come into this? Apparently, it has no responsibility for HS2, as I had it from another Written Question some time ago.

Who has the best track record? Network Rail has a very good one on electrification now. It has just completed the Werrington dive-under on the Doncaster line, which is a really good piece of work, if not so cost-effective—

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

If my noble friend will forgive me, does he think that its record on Great Western electrification is creditable to Network Rail? The costs are running at about four times the projection and it is taking three times as long as it was supposed to.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, this is only a one-hour debate and we are quite short on time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

There are two aspects of the integrated rail plan that I strongly welcome: the decision to move ahead with a metro system for Leeds and the decision to electrify the midland main line and the trans- Pennine line. However, these both reflect chaotic and inconsistent transport planning over the last 25 years.

Noble Lords from Leeds—and I see that my noble friend Lady Blake, the former leader of Leeds City Council, is here—will know that a tram system for Leeds was first proposed more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the Government of which I was a member cancelled that plan. There was supposed to be a trolleybus scheme, but that bit the dust too. We have now come full circle. Indeed, I think that the Government of which the noble Lord, Lord Horam, was a member first proposed the serious upgrading of metro services in and around Leeds, and I admire his confidence that things will now happen with an alacrity with which they failed to happen in previous decades.

The same is true of both electrification schemes. Electrification of the midland main line and the trans-Pennine line was announced 10 years ago. Midland main line electrification was supposed to follow on directly from Great Western electrification which, despite the remarks of my noble friend Lord Berkeley, has been a textbook case of disaster in terms of cost overruns, descoping and failure to meet proper project management specifications. Both those electrification schemes were then cancelled because of cost overruns and austerity, and they are being revived. We are now being told that they are a great offering to the Midlands and the north and should make us confident that there will be transformational capacity in the Midlands and the north, when in fact they are schemes that should have been delivered many years ago, if we had any proper planning.

However, the two big decisions in terms of changes of policy in the integrated rail plan—the cancellation of the eastern leg of HS2 and the cancellation of the new east-west line that was intended to link the northern cities—are both utterly deplorable. They are deplorable in three ways. First, in transport policy terms they are deplorable. As the noble Lord, Lord Beith, just said, the eastern side of the country will now essentially be left out of the high-speed rail plan. This will produce a new east-west divide in this country on top of the north-south divide, and overcoming it was a large part of the intention of HS2 in the first place. When HS2 is now completed, it will take nearly twice as long to get to Leeds as to get to Manchester and there will be only a fraction of the rail capacity going to the eastern side of the country—Sheffield and Leeds—because there is no high-speed line. High-speed lines treble rail capacity and allow an enormous release of capacity for new local services of the kind that my noble friend Lord Berkeley was talking about.

The second reason why it is deplorable is that it is a complete uprooting of proper and systematic infrastructure planning. The plan for HS2 was announced more than 10 years ago. It followed exhaustive work by HS2 Ltd. Indeed, it went back to the plan that the noble Lord, Lord Birt, produced for the Blair Government in 2003, which recommended that the Government look systematically at the introduction of high-speed lines between our major conurbations. I was privileged to be the first chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission in 2015. The first report of the National Infrastructure Commission said that HS2 should be completed to Manchester and Leeds and that there should be a new east-west line.

The third aspect in which it is deplorable is that it uproots cross-party working. We will get no serious infrastructure built in this country unless there is cross-party agreement, because it takes many Parliaments to build big infrastructure. There was cross-party agreement to HS2 and a new east-west line. There is not cross-party agreement for this integrated rail plan. It is a dog’s breakfast. The Opposition have said they have no confidence in it and will seek to change it if they come to power. We are therefore going to take a massive step back in terms of the upgrading of the infrastructure of this country, and the principal loser will unfortunately be the whole eastern side of the country, which could be at a massive economic disadvantage as a result of the IRP, compared with the Midlands and the north-west.