Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what plans he has to increase railway links from Huddersfield to other towns in the north of England.

In terms of infrastructure, we are currently working with Rail North and Network Rail to develop very significant improvements for rail passengers on the Transpennine route with phased introduction from December 2022. The upgrade aims to deliver major reductions in journey times, the ability to run more frequent and longer trains offering more seats on both long distance and local services and improvements to overall performance on the whole route. Huddersfield will be in the heart of our plans to improve access on the Transpennine route.

In addition, the new Northern and Transpennine franchises which commenced in April 2016 will deliver an unprecedented package of improvements including more than 500 new carriages, room for 40,000 extra passengers and more than 2,000 extra services a week. By 2020 all the trains will be brand new or completely refurbished, and all the Pacer trains will be gone.

Planned service improvements specifically for Huddersfield include: new trains, and longer trains, with more seats and of higher quality – including free Wi-Fi, at-seat power sockets and real-time passenger information; increased number of morning peak seats by more than 50% into Manchester and Leeds; more weekend services with some earlier starts and later finishes; an extension of North TransPennine services to Edinburgh; and increased number of direct services to Hull and Newcastle.