Britain’s northern rail project is running out of steam

Thursday marks the anniversary of a northern prophecy. Among the Victorian relics of Manchester’s science and industry museum, George Osborne, the then chancellor, announced it was time to “think big” about the north of England.

“This is the area that invented modern transport,” he said in 2014, “and yet today the transport network in the north is simply not fit for purpose — and certainly not good enough, if we want our cities to pool their strengths.” He vowed that the northern powerhouse would be underpinned by a generation of major rail investment, “a long-term plan for a country serious about its long-term economic future”.

Fast forward to this week’s parliamentary debate on HS2, the high-speed north-south rail connection, and these grand promises have been eroded. The planned Crewe to Manchester leg has all the opportunities pledged by Osborne and his successors, yet the government’s preferred design for Manchester’s HS2 station will take up half a million square metres of prime development space, costing an estimated £333mn a year in lost economic benefit by the middle of the century.

Transport minister Wendy Morton this week called the extra £4bn to £5bn cost of building the station underground “an absolutely crazy amount of money”. That this is roughly the overspend on London’s Crossrail link, which opened last month, has not gone unnoticed.

In the south of England, HS2 is being tunnelled for 10 miles beneath the rolling Chiltern Hills to ensure it does not blight the picturesque countryside. Such benefits are not on offer to Manchester, although the design its leaders requested — an underground “box” of stacked platforms — has already been used on the first phase of HS2 near to London, at Old Oak Common.

Manchester, which has been rebuilding its economy from the ashes of deindustrialisation for the past three decades, is not considered worthy of such investment. According to the government’s Integrated Rail Plan, the cost “could not be justified by the value of additional regeneration benefit”.

There was nothing in the plan to indicate how the government had made this assessment, nor how it had reached the £4bn to £5bn figure. The paper also rejected, on cost grounds, a detailed plan for high-speed pan-northern rail connections originally dreamt up by Osborne and later fleshed out by northern leaders. It did admit, however, that despite “significant” potential productivity benefits, “full analysis of the wider economic impacts of the different options has not been completed”.

Manchester’s HS2 station has become one chapter in a very familiar story. Where Osborne promised serious investment, long-term plans for northern infrastructure feel fundamentally unserious to many.

“It’s madness,” says Juergen Maier, former chief executive of Siemens UK and now heading up the Digital Catapult, which is working on a major tech hub on land near the Manchester station. “We never think about the future beyond the now. In this country, compared to Germany or France or Spain, we don’t do enough for 50 years, and then all of a sudden we have a huge bill to pay because we’re catching up.” 

While Osborne signalled an end to this inertia, few of the northern rail projects he promised have left the station, let alone gone full steam ahead. Some are stuck on Whitehall desks, while others eventually met their fate in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s updated rail plan. 

Not that Johnson rejected all Osborne’s ideas. In summer 2019, just days into his premiership, he used the very same Manchester museum backdrop to launch his levelling up agenda — Northern Powerhouse, mark two. Addressing many of the same people, the prime minister committed to a fund a high-speed line from Manchester to Leeds. It was a promise effectively broken in last year’s rail plan; the line will now no longer run all the way to Leeds, but will stop at a village 25 miles away, helping save £18bn.

“For too long,” Johnson told his audience back then, “politicians have failed to deliver on what is needed.” At least that is something everyone can agree on.

jennifer.g.williams@ft.com