[Another view on the recent announcements regarding the Transpennine Route Upgrade and the new “Northern Transport Acceleration Council”, from the Manchester Evening News (Jennifer Williams), 23rd July 2020]
As £600m is announced for the
delayed Manchester to Leeds upgrade, Tory ministers and northern Labour leaders
both now have an interest in getting things moving
After months of open warfare
between central and local government over the pandemic response, there is one
area in which the mood music is currently a little sweeter.
On northern rail projects,
traditionally the subject of much fractious political disagreement between
leaders here and those calling the shots in London, the tone has shifted and
the pace of ministerial progress, according to Andy Burnham today, has
seen a ‘gear change’.
In 2019, the background noise
was not so soothing. Jake Berry, Northern Powerhouse minister at the time,
seemed to make a habit of actively irritating local politicians – such as when
he blamed them for the continued existence of Northern Rail’s franchise, even
though behind the scenes they had been lobbying for it to be nationalised for
months.
Equally the consensus on Chris
Grayling’s tenure as transport secretary doesn’t really need repeating,
although many within local government circles are more than prepared to
reiterate it.
For much of last year and the
year before, Labour’s Andy Burnham spent a considerable amount of time
attacking the government for failing to take action on northern transport woes.
So after years of
frustration over delays, excuses, timetable failures, drifting
electrification and creaking rail corridors, it was unclear where the
rhetoric from a new Tory leadership last summer would lead.
There has been much water under
the bridge since then. With ministers conscious some evidence of ‘levelling up’
now needs to be delivered in former ‘red wall’ seats within four years, and
with leaders here as keen as ever to finally see some progress, the tone has
become more conciliatory.
Here’s the current transport
secretary Grant Shapps, writing
for Conservative Home today.
“Politically, we are the odd couple – hardly natural allies,”
he writes of his relationship with Burnham, before pressing the need to break the ‘circular argument’ that continually sees transport cash focused on London.
“But we share a desire to rectify this transport deficit, and get things moving. This is practical politics, getting together to solve problems that do not discriminate when it comes to party affiliation. But this emphasis on delivery will work for Conservative MPs across the North, too. Particularly those who helped to demolish the red wall and who now occupy marginals in which expectations are high.”
Breaking the Whitehall obsession
with self-reinforcing investment in the south east was, party politically
speaking, at one time a Labour argument. But the 2019 election result –
precipitated by Brexit – changed the rules. Politicians on both sides of the
party divide now have reason to expound it.
Announcing nearly £589m extra
towards the upgrade of the Transpennine route, Shapps noted Greater
Manchester’s Labour mayor ‘was generous in his praise for these initial steps’.
“The best aspect of this government is its willingness to experiment, not only with solutions to problems that affect us all, but in relationships with others who may not fully share our beliefs,” he wrote. “Pragmatism must be our ideology. Conservatives are best when they tackle problems in a rational, practical way. It’s what people expect of us.”
That’s quite a shift in tone
from the days of Grayling. And he’s right – Burnham was, today, very upbeat
about the latest investment. The Department for Transport press release on the
announcement featured a pretty fulsome quote from the mayor welcoming the new
cash for Transpennine electrification, twin tracking and freight upgrades,
albeit stressing that this cannot be a substitute for Northern Powerhouse
Rail.
“These were all of the things we pressed them for,”
he told the M.E.N. after a media opportunity with Shapps this morning.
“You can’t go out there pressing them and then when they do it, find another reason to criticise them.”
The working relationship is ‘very different with this transport secretary than the last’, he conceded, adding:
“There’s no need to find reasons to disagree with him.”
Insiders say the two get on
pretty well personally, which doesn’t do any harm. Meanwhile Shapps is viewed
as far less partisan or ideological than either Berry or Grayling. But a
thawing of relations should come as no great surprise for other reasons too.
The interests of both
politicians now align pretty neatly. For Andy Burnham, despite his role not
actually including the railways, campaigning on the north’s crippled network
has become a hallmark of his first term. So far he has been able – partly
through deft political choreography – to claim credit for forcing the renationalisation
of the failing Northern Rail franchise and regularly notes that transport is
the issue people contact him about the most.
On the government’s side, the
need to enact change quickly is an imperative. Both before and after the
general election, political advisors in London were on the eye out for projects
that could be delivered swiftly.
Step up the new ‘northern
transport acceleration council’ announced today, a body focused on delivery
that will comprise northern leaders promised a hotline into Grant Shapps as
chair. The first phase of the Transpennine upgrade could be one of the projects
completed within this Parliament.
One senior local figure notes we’ve been here before, however.
“What he’s announced gets announced on a regular basis and has been announced repeatedly over the last eight years,”
they note dryly, a reference to years of promises by government stretching back to George Osborne’s days in the Treasury.
But, equally, the government itself
wants – and needs – to get things delivered.
“I do think there’s a new tone from government of frustration,” they add.
“I’m not sure it’s always aimed in the right places, because I don’t think they are well served by the Department for Transport or Network Rail. But there is a frustration that the progress on the ground isn’t happening and there’s now a real determination to change that. If that is the case, then that’s got to be relatively good news.”
Many questions remain. Today’s
£600m is only for the first phase of the Transpennine upgrade and when asked by
the M.E.N. about the timescale for the wider project, the transport secretary
today admitted it won’t be done before the next election.
“We’ll have the whole project completed in the 2020s but this part of it completed within this Parliament, so before 2024,” he said.
So theoretically, it could be
the best part of a decade before this work – originally slated for the end of
2022 – is finished?
“Yes,” he admitted, before
distancing this latest plan from the scheme tabled by Chris Grayling, which
never got done.
“In terms of what we’re now proposing is I think a bigger deal than’s been on the cards.
“There’s been a £3bn programme up to now for partial electrification with some additional bits and pieces…but I think we’re very likely to be saying ‘actually, we should be doing this job properly’.
“We should be electrifying throughout and we should get journey times down to 30 minutes, which we’re a long way from at the moment.
“And the package we’ve described up until now doesn’t get us there. So this is upping the game.”
The full details of what will
and will not be funded won’t surface until the end of the year, however, as part
of the government’s ‘integrated rail plan’, which will also cover northern
high-speed links.
Being transport secretary has to
be one of the more enjoyable jobs in government at the moment, so it is perhaps
no wonder he’s chipper. Chequebooks are being opened for his department in the
wake of repeated promises of increased capital spending, all the way from 2019
manifesto to March Budget to post-lockdown relaunch.
Improvements to the Castlefield
rail bottleneck could fall into the bracket of first-term investment too,
although at present that has merely been given a £10m pot to draw up a plan.
Shapps seemed to admit today that the result, which comes after endless reviews
of previous plans, won’t necessarily include long-promised extra platforms at
Piccadilly Station.
Giving Piccadilly new platforms
at 15 and 16 had ‘almost become a totemic thing’ where delayed upgrades are
concerned, he said, but added: “I don’t really care how we resolve this. I just
want it fixed.
“I asked some good people to work out what needs to be done if we are to sort out the corridor and they proposed that £10m would help see it through. And we’ll see what they come out the other end with.”
The plan so far seems to involve
re-routing some services that currently run through Piccadilly’s desperately
cramped platforms 13 and 14 – including pan-northern services – through
Victoria instead. Infrastructure improvements would still also be needed,
including on junctions at Ordsall and Ardwick, as well as radical change to the
timetable in December next year.
Leaders here remain skeptical
about this, particularly given the number of previous solutions lying around in
Whitehall. They still believe in a need to run longer trains through
Piccadilly, for example, while one insider points out that the trains run by
various operators have doors in different places, adding a basic complication
to the logistics.
“If you’re not careful, you end up spending more than you would have done just doing 15 and 16,” they note.
Burnham is unsure too.
“I’m less confident about that,”
he told the M.E.N. of whether the latest plan would work.
“We have frustrations that a scheme that’s been worked up over the years again is being abandoned, seemingly in favour of an alternative, which we haven’t yet details of.
“It’s my position, [Manchester council leader] Sir Richard Leese’s position, Greater Manchester’s position, that 15 and 16 should be in the scheme. They’ve got a short time from here to tell us something is better. They’ve got a short window.”
Meanwhile rail infrastructure is
only one part of the transport equation.
In towns and cities across the
north it will be local public transport that makes the biggest difference to
the lives of most people, particularly buses.
Currently, as one transport
figure says, buses are ‘driving around carrying fresh air’ due to the Covid-19
crisis and bailout packages for many local transport networks – including the
Metrolink – run out next month, with no indication as to what will happen next.
Equally, whether the increasingly
pragmatic view being taken in Greater Manchester is shared in other northern
communities is another question.
Not everywhere has a mayor with
the kind of platform or connections enjoyed by Burnham, while other areas have
worries about other drifting projects – such as the threat to HS2’s eastern
leg.
But there is certainly
widespread relief at no longer having to deal with Shapps’s predecessor.
“It’s certainly an improvement from Grayling,”
says one local official elsewhere of the current situation, while another notes:
“It’s like night and day.”
Given that pragmatic
relationships with Tory governments have been a longstanding feature of Greater
Manchester’s approach, there is now a calculation that it’s at least worth a
go.
Both sides will have an eye to take credit for progress at the other end, but that may just be how things end up getting done. As one official says of pragmatism over naked partisanship:
“Everyone knows everyone else is playing the game.”
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/political-peace-broken-out-over-18652337
