A report out today claims that the Northern PowerHouse Rail scheme is a project which achieves the difficult feat of making HS2 look sensible.
The report entitled Instead of High Speed Rail from the Think Tank Policy Exchange with a forward by the Deputy Leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice MP – sets out a series of alternative schemes which would deliver more, to more people, in more places, more quickly.
It comes as The Government says it will soon “set out further details on its plans for Northern Powerhouse Rail,” ahead of the Party Conference
In the forward to the report Richard Tice claims the scheme “will cost up to £30 billion – but journeys on it between those two great cities will actually take longer than the rail service does nowAnd if the line is extended across the Pennines to Leeds, another £40 billion might be needed – for a journey time saving of around ten minutes.
He also says that Ministers are also preparing a revival of the cancelled northern leg of HS2, a further £25-30bn commitment.
“History shows these numbers will be tens of billions higher.”
This report suggests a whole series of such improvements – including an “Elizabeth Line” for Manchester – which would deliver more, for more people, in more places, more quickly, more cheaply than any high-speed rail scheme.
The report also claims that the “airport” station would actually be a mile away, and you would have to transfer by bus. That journey, too, would be slower, or at best no quicker, than by the current conventional trains running into the airport itself.
The Northern Powerhouse Partnership, is also slammed
“It claims to be the “voice of the North’s business and civic leaders,”15 is in fact substantially a lobbying operation for high-speed rail. Eight of its 10 private-sector directors work for firms with direct commercial interests in HS2. Between them, their companies (or joint ventures of which they are part) have already collected at least £8.3 billion from the project, with far more to come.”
As mentioned earlier the report as an alternative recommends a high-capacity east-west route across central Manchester to tackle the North’s worst rail bottleneck.
As in London, the new element would be a tunnel under the city centre, with an underground station at Manchester Piccadilly, to join up the existing conventional lines either side. Those lines would be electrified and upgraded for higher speed and capacity, as some already have been or are being.
A two-track tunnel they say would, like its London sister, have the capacity for 30 trains an hour each way – almost four times more than the service proposed for Northern Powerhouse Rail.
It would increase rail capacity across Manchester by around 100 per cent, far more than NPR. A two- track tunnel with a four-platform underground station at Piccadilly would increase capacity by around 130 per cent; a four-track tunnel would increase it by 200 per cent.
A Labour Spokesperson responding to Reform’s announcement said:
“Yet again Reform have said what they’re against but have no plan for delivering what they’re supposedly in favour of. They don’t know.
“Only Labour is investing in rail, connecting communities across the North and delivering the modern transport system Britain needs through our Plan for Change.”
