Mayors in the North are ramping up pressure on the Government over its controversial rail plan.
Andy Burnham, along with North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll, Liverpool’s Steve Rotherham, and West Yorkshire’s Tracy Brabin, are calling for the scheme to be put to a free vote in the House of Commons, ChronicleLive reports.
Earlier in the day, the Labour mayor for Greater Manchester called the proposals ‘a Championship option when we need a Premier League option’.
He told the Manchester Evening News: “If the test is connectivity across the North, then this plan comes up short.
“What you've got is a Championship option when we need a Premier League option.
“If you’ve going to level up, you can’t level up with second best — you can only level up with the most ambitious proposals and that is not what this is. You’d be hard pushed to say levelling up would be in the core consideration of this.”
Overall, the plan only delivers half of what Northern leaders were hoping for in terms of funding, at £18bn.
The savings have slain hopes of a new 40-mile high speed line all the way from Manchester to Leeds — with the latest proposals being a high speed new line from Warrington to Marsden in Yorkshire — where it will be tacked onto an upgraded Transpennine route.
Closer to home, there will be no underground high speed station at Piccadilly, with the government arguing the extra £4bn of cost compared to a surface station not providing enough economic benefits to merit funding.
No decision has also been made on long-hoped-for capacity upgrades in Manchester city centre, which were first promised by George Osborne in 2014.
His ambition would have seen two platforms added at Piccadilly and an expansion at Oxford Road — to ease a bottleneck that helped drive the Northern rail network meltdown in May 2018.
As was clear at a joint mayoral press conference this afternoon, leaders are furious at the revisions — prompting the open letter calling for a free vote in Parliament on the plan.
The vote would put many of the Conservative MPs elected in the North on ‘levelling up’ promises two years ago in a difficult position.
The mayors’ letter — which is also signed by a number of Northern council leaders in the — says: “In our view, this pared-back plan will not unlock the full potential of the North of England.
“These decisions go beyond party politics and indeed our generation. They are critical to the future of the North for the next 100 years and more. Given this, we believe elected representatives in all parts of the country should have an opportunity to consider whether your proposals represent a fair deal for their constituents before they are finalised.
“We are therefore asking you to call a free vote on these plans in Parliament.”
Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes also criticised the rail plan, saying: “What we have seen today is yet another broken promise by a Government which is starting to make this a habit.
“Scrapping the HS2 Eastern Leg will mean we will not realise the same reductions in journey times to and from Newcastle and other major cities, nor will we get the new generation of trains from HS2. We had come to terms with not having High Speed track, thinking we’d still benefit from the trains and potentially some of the jobs, but as it stands there’s now next to nothing.”
