Paul Salveson airs concerns on “Northern Powerhouse Rail”
Readers will be aware of my long-standing antipathy to HS2. It was an ill-conceived project from the start, of little benefit to the North. It only got worse with cost overruns and delays on a colossal scale. These appear to be continuing. The whole thing is a complete mess. Attention is now shifting towards the North, with Liverpool and Greater Manchester mayors pushing for “Northern Powerhouse Rail”, which involves a new route from Liverpool to Manchester, an underground station at Piccadilly, with the route continuing east towards Bradford and Leeds. Whilst I’m a bit more sympathetic towards this than HS2, I’ve always had worries about this project.
These concerns are articulated in a new report by the right-leaning Policy Exchange, which has been commissioned by Reform to produce a report called Instead of High-Speed Rail. It’s written by former Boris Johnson advisor Andrew Gilligan and includes a foreword by Reform’s vice-chair Richard Tice. At this stage, some readers will be asking I have gone completely bonkers, with a lurch to the right? Surely anything even vaguely linked to the Faragist lot must be the work of the devil? Well, I think it pays to have an open mind. The report is well-argued and basically says a lot of what I’ve been saying about HS2 for the last ten years in Chartist.
The report doesn’t say much new about HS2, and my own view is that now the project is so far advanced, it really has to continue to Crewe. The suggestions made in the report to make some costly upgrades to the existing West Coast Main Line after HS2 joins it north of Birmingham don’t really stack up.
Where the report gets interesting is its critique of Northern Powerhouse Rail. This project has had a very easy ride in terms of Northern opinion – or at least that part which has access to the media – eg politicians, business and the like. Yet how much support it really has is debatable. As Tice says in his foreword to the report, “Outside a bubble of politicians, journalists and construction industry lobbyists…the voters of the North…want the money to be spent on the often failing railways (and roads) that they actually use.”
The proposed new route from Liverpool to Manchester uses some existing track and some new formation to go via Manchester Airport into central Manchester. As the report points out, the journey will take longer than the existing Chat Moss route! It’s hard to make a case for the new route freeing up capacity as the two routes from Manchester to Liverpool both have capacity for more, and longer, trains.
More searching questions should be asked about the proposed new Trans-Pennine route. Currently, Network Rail is investing heavily in the Trans-Pennine Upgrade (TRU), which will bring greater resilience to the busy route. The line must be electrified throughout and further capacity improvements made to accommodate freight and local passenger services. A new route would, it’s true, bring useful capacity improvements for the long-term, but at an astronomic cost (the report suggests £30 billion). It would be immensely difficult and disruptive to build.
So what is the alternative? There are several options which should be looked at. The report makes some interesting suggestions which need further scrutiny. Abandon the chimaera of high-speed rail, it argues, and put the money saved into improvements to the existing network. Agreed. The solutions need to be looked at, and the biggest challenge that has to be faced is the central Manchester conundrum. The highly congested corridor between Piccadilly, Oxford Road and Deansgate is carrying a level of traffic it was never built for; even with signalling improvements, it will always be a massive headache for operators.
The report suggests a new “Elizabeth Line of the North” tunnelling under central Manchester and providing connections to all parts of the network. An alternative option is to quadruple the line between Piccadilly and Deansgate. That wouldn’t be easy, but it might be less costly than a tunnel. However, I think the tunnel would potentially bring greater benefits – especially if there was a spur, more or less following the original Picc-Vic proposal to Victoria and on to the Rochdale and Stalybridge routes across the Pennines. These things are easily said, but the cost would be substantial. On the other hand, the economic benefits would be massive.
The Policy Exchange report makes other recommendations which are less controversial – electrification of most of the Northern network, new rolling stock and capacity improvements. It makes very welcome suggestions for a fully integrated public transport network across the North.
The report deserves a good airing – just because you don’t like the body that commissioned it, or even the person who wrote it, doesn’t invalidate its arguments. But I suspect that will be the response from a lot of people up North, sadly.