The new body being planned to take over the running over the UK rail system should be based in the North to counter years of neglect for the region’s transport system, politicians in the region say.
The call for Great British Railways - which the Government wants to take on the running of the country’s rail services from 2021 - to be headquartered in the region came as Transport for the North’s rail committee outlined a string of complaints about downgrading of train services.
A number of political and business leaders around the North have criticised planned timetable changes which see services between towns and cities in the region cancelled to make room for increased services to London.
Those changes came after rising tensions among Northern leaders over a period of months over the state of the region’s transport systems, with Transport for the North’s budget being cut by Whitehall, delays to a national rail plan and rumours of rail improvements in the North being downgraded.
After hearing complaints from political leaders in the North East, Yorkshire and the North West, committee chairman and Liverpool councillor Liam Robinson said there was a danger of the new rail body being based in London and making decisions that favoured areas in the south.
That risked repeating the timetable problems seen in the North in 2018 that brought regional leaders together to call for better services across the North, he said.
Coun Robinson said: “If we’re not careful we will be done to rather than guiding the reforms.
“I welcome a national guiding mind for the railways; if we’d had that we probably wouldn’t have had the disaster we had in the North in May 2018.
“I do think it’s important that we don’t have that guiding mind based in London. I think there’s a very strong argument that GB Railways should be based in the North of England as a kind of inward-investment for one of the towns or cities up here.”
Planned changes to the East Coast mainline operator announced last week by operator LNER have been described as a “disaster scenario” for the North East, with services from the region to Manchester cut while plans to improve links between Teesside, Sunderland, and Newcastle would be postponed.
Reacting to those plans, North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll said: “We are pushing through an irrational decision based on a criteria being changed on the assumption that improvements that were going to happen but haven’t happened.
“It’s going to lead to reduced connectivity not only within our region but across the North and yet again this is coming down to running the economy in a London-centric way.”
Complaints about planned timetable changes also came from Bradford Council leader Susan Hinchcliffe and South Yorkshire mayor Dan Jarvis.
