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The clue appears on the cover of Rishi Sunak’s vision for new multi-billion pound infrastructure projects in the north.
His master plan was a map on which someone made an unusual executive decision – to move Manchester roughly to a point more than 30 miles north of Preston. This is a truly radical policy for the government.
Sunak’s blueprint, which was the centerpiece of this year’s party conference speech, was supposed to offer a more politically popular alternative to HS2’s northern leg. But Manchester’s dislocation was just the beginning. As many have pointed out, the Northern Network is neither a network nor largely located in the North, but the launch process is less like a slow-moving train wreck and, ironically, more like A high-speed train.
The Prime Minister finally canceled the northern section of HS2, a spectacle to behold in a former Victorian railway exchange building in Manchester that dates back to the last time we had a serious transport project built in the north of England. But this stunning, almost surreal juxtaposition of speech and environment seems to have evolved into the policy of performance art.
Sunak’s alternative transport plans, set to begin in less than 24 hours, include two tram extensions to places that have had trams for the better part of a decade; the North East Limside Line Reopening, a piece of happy news quickly dropped from plans; a new public transport network for Bristol also quickly dropped; and a Southampton scheme for Littlehampton.
Ministers later confirmed that a £100m study into how to get high-speed trains to Leeds in the future – which was initially only promised as part of the move to exclude the city from HS2 two years ago – has also been scrapped of comfort. Local leaders only received the terms of reference for the study a few weeks ago.
So much for the plans outside the capital. But the Department for Transport later confirmed that – oops – the HS2 terminus at Euston now has no funding, so it’s not guaranteed.
By this week, Sunak said some of the projects he had announced were “illustrative”. Just traffic vibes, if you will. One stunned local government contact objected to this constant improvisation: “I like jazz, but not in a policy-making sense.”
Meanwhile, each proposed investment still needs to be signed off “on a case-by-case basis”, which is difficult to come by with a clear outcome, according to the Department for Transport, although the government insists it is committed to anything that is not currently considered “prescriptive”.
It should be stressed that this whimsical approach to UK infrastructure planning is not unprecedented. In Manchester, the government has only found time to build one element of its plans to unclog the city center’s notorious Northern Rail bottleneck. As ministers canceled other parts, the parts they built actually made the situation worse.
Continuous changes to electrification plans in the Pennines have wasted £190m, according to the National Audit Office. As for Northumberland’s A1 double-header, which Sunak recommitted last week, the list of all other venues already committed is quite long.
It is certainly a courageous approach by the Prime Minister to plan something vital to the country’s economy and particularly to the prosperity of the North. It’s also a reminder of why Greater Manchester’s Labor mayor Andy Burnham’s narrative – loosely summarized as “London doesn’t care about us” – was so electorally successful; and why polls show voters, esp. In the North West and Yorkshire, there is deep skepticism about transport promises.
It remains to be seen how committed the incoming Labor government will be to such projects, particularly the east-west high-speed rail network across the north that it initially signed up for. The real counter to the chaos in government came not from the main opposition frontbenchers, but from a pragmatic response from regional political and business leaders.
Attempts to develop alternative funding models for the northern section of HS2 have not yet been completely abandoned. Burnham and his Tory counterparts in Andy Street in the West Midlands want to do this either through land value capture (a tax on businesses that will realize an increase in the value of their assets as a result of improved rail links) or through direct private investment, or Combining the two, it is possible for high-speed rail to reach the north.
Initial anger at Sunak’s decision has turned into a determination to find a sensible solution without Westminster or Whitehall – by someone who can at least put the North’s biggest city on a map.
jennifer.g.williams@ft.com
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