Boris Johnson’s revised rail plan faces a backlash in northern England

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Boris Johnson has unveiled a major downsizing of his two pioneering high-speed rail plans in northern England to save tens of billions of pounds in exchange for smaller improvements that have left local leaders furious.

The prime minister is canceling two-thirds of the HS2 extension that runs from Birmingham to Leeds as well as relaxing plans for Northern Powerhouse Rail, a project to improve links between cities in the region.

The changes, announced as part of the government’s £96 billion integrated rail plan, will hit Leeds and Bradford hard and threaten to undermine the government’s settlement agenda.

On Thursday, Sir Edward Lee, the Conservative MP for Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, joined the chorus of criticism of the prime minister for breaching his pledge to provide high-speed rail to all of northern England.

He told the House of Commons: “HS2 has always been a white elephant, but as far as the East Coast is concerned, it is now a white elephant who has lost a leg.” “We have been promised that it will ease congestion on the East Coast Main Line because it is going to Leeds. Where is that promise?”

Some small improvements, however, were welcomed by transport campaign groups, which they argued would yield significant gains for local transport more quickly.

The government said the plan consisted of £54 billion of spending on rail and local transport in the Central and North and £42 billion already earmarked for HS2 phases from London to the West Midlands and Crewe.

The Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a group of business and civic leaders, has estimated that the integrated rail plan represents a £36 billion cut from the cost of the full HS2 and their vision for the Northern Powerhouse rail.

The plan represents a massive downsizing of HS2, which the Prime Minister committed “in full” to as recently as last year.

The scheme was first sold – more than a decade ago – as a replacement for a third runway at Heathrow that would depart from Scotland and join the existing high-speed rail line to Europe but now has no connection to either.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has confirmed that the eastern part of HS2, which would have connected Birmingham to the Leeds, will mostly be scrapped. Instead, this part of the line will only run as far as East Midlands Parkway, a station near Nottingham.

The Treasury has become increasingly concerned about escalating delays and project costs. Back-to-back reports by public spending watchdogs have warned there is little clarity on the rate, which has already stretched to at least £100 billion.

The first phase of the line, from London to Birmingham, is under construction but a National Audit Office report last year warned that only 5 to 10 per cent of planning for the second phase after Birmingham was complete.

Large parts of East Station present a major engineering challenge as they will have to pass over old coal mines and through major population centers while traversing the highway network dozens of times.

Instead, Network Rail, which manages the existing rail infrastructure, will take control of a series of improvements to legacy lines.

Ministers said the plan would mean doubling or doubling the passenger capacity on many lines.

But for some lines, this will be a much smaller increase than they would have been under the previous strategy. Passenger capacity on the London to Leeds line will now be half of what it would have been if the entire eastern portion of HS2 had been built.

Instead, solace will be offered to Leeds, including the electrification of the Main Midland Line that runs from London through Nottingham and Sheffield to Leeds, as well as an initial investment of £200 million in a new £2 billion urban tram network for the city. “Right now, Leeds is the largest city in Western Europe without a metro or light rail,” said a government figure.

There will be “winners and losers even in the North,” said Tony Travers, director of a research group at the London School of Economics.

“It won’t bring as much capacity and speed as the original HS2 would have in many places, but in some cases it will bring improvements to existing rail that are better than the HS2 and arrive more quickly assuming they can all be delivered.”

Paul Twohy, chief executive of Better Transport, said there was “a lot to welcome”, including commitments to local transport such as the Leeds Metro, which would make a “real difference to day trips”. “Improvements must be implemented as quickly and affordably as possible,” he added.

Shapps highlighted the savings in flight time with flight time from Birmingham to Nottingham reduced from 75 minutes to 26 minutes, while travel from York to Manchester will be cut from 83 minutes to 55 minutes.

But the changes were met with anger from northern lawmakers and business leaders.

“What northern leaders proposed was an economic transformational vision,” said Henry Morrison, director of Northern Powerhouse Partnership. “What we have, as always, is second class.”

“Today’s announcement of the integrated rail plan is a betrayal of North Korea, and a betrayal of the government’s promise of compromise,” said Tracy Braben, Labor Mayor of West Yorkshire. “This does not fit.”

Bradford will be hardest hit by the decision to scale back Northern Powerhouse Rail’s plans.

The original vision for the project, which included an entire new line from Leeds to Manchester, at a cost of £39 billion, would be replaced by a hybrid model.

The new £17.2 billion scheme would include a new line from Manchester to Marsden near Huddersfield, but would only see upgrades to the existing Transpennine line from there to Leeds.

The hybrid model is still expected to cut journey times from Leeds to Manchester from 53 minutes to 33 minutes, close to the 29 minutes that an entirely new high-speed route would have taken.

But the road will bypass Bradford, which the local council says has the worst railways of any big city in England.

Lord Jim O’Neill, a former Tory minister and vice-chairman of Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said the announcement was “visibly sad” for the people of Bradford.

As compensation, the existing line between Bradford and Leeds will be upgraded, halving the journey time to 12 minutes. Despite this, O’Neill said that for a city of more than half a million people, it “finds itself neglected again . . . it doesn’t make much sense.”

The government has also announced that it is spending £3.5 billion improving the East Coast main line from London to York and Edinburgh.

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