As a Yorkshire lass living in London I’m struck by the difference in transport provision between the north and south of the UK. Put simply, they feel like different countries. Taking a train from my home in west London into town, I ride on shiny, modern trains (if they aren’t cancelled that is, or on strike – thanks Southern!). Taking a train from Leeds to my home town of Harrogate, I ride in rolling stock that’s had a hard life; noisy and old. King’s Cross and St Pancras stations seem to me places of architectural wonder. Not so Leeds station.
Similarly, I’ve driven from Leeds to Manchester via the bleakly beautiful M62 motorway (the highest in the UK near Saddleworth Moor) more times than I care to remember. It’s congested and subject to frequent closures. The cities are only 45 miles apart but of course there are the immoveable Pennines in between. In Europe, roads often go straight through the mountains – last year, as our family drove to Italy, we gave up counting tunnels somewhere around the number 50.
So I was excited to hear that Transport for the North (TfN) have announced ambitious plans to transform transport across the North of England. Projects include a Trans-Pennine road tunnel between Sheffield and Manchester and a new rail line between Manchester and Leeds via Bradford. Trains are planned to travel at up to 125 miles per hour between the six biggest northern cities.
A Trans-Pennine tunnel is great news. If it ever happens that is. Aye, there’s the rub. My excitement was sadly short-lived when I learnt that this is a plan for public consultation until April, and a final plan will be put to the government later this year for consideration. TfN will become England’s first sub-national transport body but will not have statutory powers; nor will it be able to generate its own income as Transport for London can. This perhaps explains why Lord Prescott stormed out, declaring it ‘a bloody fraud’.
The timescale is 30 years – a very long time for urgently needed improvements. And of course, in the end it comes down to money. The schemes cost £2.3 billion a year – £150 per Northern passenger. Not very much put like that, but taken together, £69 billion is a big number, and we don’t know how much future governments will be prepared to pay, or how much may be raised privately.
Some things are clear, however. One is that levels of spending on infrastructure in London are a world away from the rest of the country. Figures from 2016-17 show spending on publicly funded or part-private, part-public funded projects to be £1900 per person in London, against a mere £220 in the North East. In Yorkshire and Humberside, it drops to £190.
There has long been a focus on connectivity running north to south, most often to and from London, both by road and rail. Train journey times have been cut dramatically and HS2 will continue this. But attention on east to west links has been sorely lacking. As Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, said ‘it takes longer today to get from Chester to Manchester than it did in 1962’. Journey times from Manchester to Sheffield, Preston and Liverpool have only reduced by a couple of minutes.
As chancellor and MP for Tatton near Manchester, George Osborne championed the notion of The Northern Powerhouse, and he was right to do so. There is vast human potential in the north of England, which is home to around 16 million people. Good transport would measurably improve their lives, and would directly increase productivity.
The north-south divide only grows deeper, as does the gap between the capital and everywhere else. One of my northern friends frequently berates me for living in the capital: Londoners are in a bubble, he says, and don’t have much clue (or care) about the rest of the country. The morning after the EU referendum, a man said the same to me in M&S as we looked at the newspaper headlines and I confessed to living in London. Neither of these people were down on their luck, disaffected types. My friend runs a highly successful business in Knutsford, one of the most privileged pockets of Cheshire; the other was a well-heeled retired gentleman in Harrogate, a very wealthy town in Yorkshire. This sentiment runs deep. And I have to admit, they are not wrong.
The Brexit vote was just one demonstration of how disconnected many people are from their fellow countrymen – and how Westminster just doesn’t ‘get’ many of those it supposedly represents. Theresa May seemed to understand this in her speech outside Number 10 when she became leader. The government would be wise to support the TfN schemes. It claims to be building ‘a country that works for everyone’. Even northerners, I hope.