Five Labour metro mayors — London’s Sadiq Khan, Greater Manchester’s Andy Burnham, West Yorkshire’s Tracy Brabin, South Yorkshire’s Oliver Coppard, and Liverpool City Region’s Steve Rotheram — are meeting in Leeds to sign a joint letter to the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asking him to go ahead with both HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail in full.
The five mayors said they had been “inundated by concern from businesses” and that “failure to deliver HS2 and NPR will leave swathes of the North with Victorian transport infrastructure that is unfit for purpose and cause huge economic damage in London and the South, where construction of the line has already begun.”
The news comes as the Times newspaper says that a senior Whitehall source says that scrapping the northern leg of HS2 would leave senior civil servants no choice but to register a formal objection on value-for-money grounds.
Meanwhile the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs said that they would be willing to back a long delay if ministers commit to building the east-to-west Northern route linking Liverpool to Hull with a High Speed line connecting thru Manchester and Leeds
