Levelling up hits the buffers

Editorial: The latest HS2 announcement looks very much like a plan that’s designed to deliver the bare minimum of the government’s pledges

(Dave Brown)

It may well be the case that the government’s integrated rail plan, aka scrapping the HS2 extension to Leeds, will improve some rail links in the underinvested north. The plan is to upgrade and improve existing links and to build shorter HS2-style links around the east Midlands and from Crewe to Manchester. Journeys from Manchester to Leeds will, it is claimed, be quicker, but they will not be truly high speed.

Beyond that, there’s not that much integration to be seen. Leeds in particular has been short changed, while Newcastle, Sunderland, Dewsbury, Halifax, Doncaster and Bradford, in need of better links much more than the likes of Manchester and Birmingham, are left with nothing. A total investment of some £96bn, albeit some of it pre-announced and recycled, should yield some economic benefits, and it is fair to point out that these improvements will arrive sooner than in the original plan. But it does not live up to the slogans of “build back better” and “levelling up”, both of which are proving pretty vacuous.

It signals some disturbing developments. Plainly, the Treasury is in the driver’s seat of the HS2 project, and is erring on the side of caution and economy, as is the Treasury way. It looks very much like a plan that’s designed to deliver the bare minimum of the government’s pledges, and at minimal cost. It does not look far into the future, out towards the next century. We cannot foresee what the social, cultural and economic benefits of a grand line linking Liverpool to Hull via Manchester and Leeds will be, but now this generation and future ones are unlikely to find out.

The goal the prime minister set was for the north and midlands to be as well-connected as London and the southeast, and that is not happening. If Bradford had been treated as creatively as Brighton, which has enjoyed a fast link to London for decades, the lives and prospects of its people would be transformed. Maybe there aren’t enough marginal seats in cities such as Bradford.

It also suggests the Treasury is wary of even “borrowing to invest”, given the overall state of the public finances post-Covid. This is doubly concerning because the northern economy will be deprived of that sustained higher level of public investment designed to pick up the slack from depressed private sector investment post-Brexit. Investment leads to higher productivity and thus more profitable businesses and higher wages in the long term. So the gap in living standards between north and south is actually set to widen. Many trains will continue to be “ram packed”, as Jeremy Corbyn once complained.

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Such problems are invisible politically now, but what is very apparent is a sense of broken trust and betrayal. That is an immediate problem for a party that has lost its confidence and is finding it more difficult to bribe the voters with their own money. The 2019 manifesto was effectively a display cabinet for the benefits that would inevitably flow into left-behind communities upon the return of a Conservative administration. It plainly stated: “We will build Northern Powerhouse Rail between Leeds and Manchester and then focus on Liverpool, Tees Valley, Hull, Sheffield and Newcastle.”

Well, they aren’t. When Boris Johnson appealed to voters in Labour’s “red wall” seats, he asked them to lend him their votes, and judge him by the results. After the erosion of his party and his personal ratings in the aftermath of Covid, a tough Budget and the sleaze scandals, the prime minister has delivered yet another disappointment to those who backed him so confidently in 2019. They may well decide not to renew the loan when the day arrives in 2023 or 2024.

They say all politics is local, and nowhere is that more true than on transport links. The electorate knew the kind of unreliable man Mr Johnson was in 2019, and some voted for him even so. He is doing an excellent job of underperforming on the limited expectations people had of him.