An interesting take on discussions involving Transport for the North and regional politicians.
All these discussions and the decisions that follow from them are taking place behind closed doors, with us as passengers and citizens being expected just to gratefully accept whatever our feuding Lords and Masters decide we ought to have.
The North can’t be united and work together if passengers’ interests are excluded from the process.
[Opinion in Manchester Evening News by Jennifer Williams, 18th August 2019, follows]
Jen Williams: Why the dream of a functioning northern transport network is now at a critical point
As negotiations ramp up with government over new rail links, last week saw a row break out among northern leaders and officials. But now, more than ever, one united voice from the region is essential
Last weekend the Yorkshire Post ran a great exclusive about what Andy Burnham had been doing the other side of the Pennines.
At the latest meeting of Transport for the North – the semi-independent body that draws up transport strategy on behalf of all northern councils – in Leeds, Greater Manchester’s mayor had refused point blank to support the £39bn high speed rail plan drawn up by officials, which was due to be submitted to government.
This was because the document mysteriously no longer included a demand that the planned HS2 terminus at a rebuilt Piccadilly Station be created underground, a more expensive option, but one leaders here believe is vital to tie it into better future connections to other northern cities.
His argument was consistent with everything Manchester had been saying for some time, both publicly and privately.
Yet despite having been told the proposal would be in the document, a week before the meeting leaders discovered officials had taken it out.
What followed was a ‘fraught’ discussion (big row) that resulted in TfN being sent away to redo it.
Behind that incident sit some interesting and revealing tensions, between leaders and officials, between different regions and, as ever, between the north and the government.
They also raise important questions about if and how we can actually get the transport network we need here, or whether we are destined to forever beg the Department for Transport for crumbs.
One of those tensions relates to TfN itself. Set up as a pan-northern organisation intended to plan and lobby government for better transport links, increasingly politicians and local officials across the region feel it is not representing the ambition they had envisaged. Some are starting to even question whether there’s any point to it.
In Greater Manchester there is certainly, as usual, a feeling that there’s no point coming up with plans if they’re not ambitious – as one politician here says regarding Piccadilly, ‘if Westminster wants to criticise our ambition that’s for them to do, not TfN’. We still haven’t had the piecemeal rail improvements we were originally promised, they point out, but that is no reason not to articulate a vision for something truly excellent.
Another senior insider here says TfN did a great job dealing with last year’s northern rail meltdown, adding that the body had been crucial in helping to ‘untangle the chaos’ of what had fundamentally gone wrong – unlike government.
However, in the last year or so, since becoming a statutory body, they said it had become more like a ‘broker’ between the north and the government, as opposed to a voice advocating for ambitious transport upgrades. Leaders find themselves demanding one thing, they said, before finding the plan had slipped back towards the DfT’s position by the time they next met.
“That ain’t going to work, because in that case why not deal directly with the DfT?”, they add, not the only person I hear make that point.
Another insider on the other side of the Pennines points to a difference in mindset between the northern politicians overseeing things and the civil servants charged with drawing up the plans. While mayors and leaders, for the most part, want to think big and transformative, officials lean towards the traditional Whitehall thinking of going for the cheaper, more conservative option.
One senior politician here agrees with that analysis, adding darkly:
“There needs to be a conversation within TfN about reminding them who they work for.”
TfN would consider that unfair. Doubtless they would point out that whatever case they put to government, it still needs to go through restrictive Treasury processes at a time when finances remain perilously uncertain and Boris Johnson will see little political gain in giving Manchester a better station. Universally, everyone agrees TfN needs to be given a proper budget, with coherent spending decisions made in the north.
But a senior figure elsewhere in the the north says TfN has so far failed to make the case to government about what we need and deserve.
“There’s not many pan-northern organisations that can put pressure on government and TfN have the mandate to be far more demanding,” they argue.
“Instead they leave it up to individual mayors like Andy Burnham. The problem with that is that under Theresa May, every time Andy or Steve [Rotherham, Liverpool city region mayor] or Dan [Jarvis, Sheffield city region mayor] opened their mouth, Number 10 would retreat because they worried about negative headlines.”
We are now in a new era, of course, and one in which advisers to Boris Johnson are eyeing up an election.
At his speech in Manchester a few weeks ago the new PM committed only to the Manchester to Leeds part of the ‘Northern Powerhouse Rail’ plan, envisaged by leaders here as an entire network. In fairness, I’m told DfT officials hadn’t even wanted him to do that, arguing he should just upgrade the existing line. “You’d have to shut the main line from Manchester to Leeds for about five years if you did that,” points out one transport insider, neatly highlighting what the region is up against. Even so, Boris Johnson’s promise is still actually less than what George Osborne had pledged in 2014.
“The evidence is clearly there that they are not delivering,” says one senior Merseyside figure of both the government and TfN’s approach to the state of the transport network. There was no mention of Liverpool in the speech.
“You get Boris here announcing Manchester to Leeds, a regurgitation five years after George Osborne first mentioned it. I rest my case.”
Meanwhile Tees Valley’s Tory mayor Ben Houchen caused further ructions at the last TfN meeting. Some have detected the hand of government in his comments to fellow leaders, asking why the rest of the north should support Manchester in arguing for a more expensive station.
“This is what TfN has been good at avoiding,” says one senior politician here, “which is picking off one bit of the north against another.” There is a suspicion government wants to start trimming back HS2 and is pitting areas against each other as a result, undermining that northern voice.
The same goes for fun and games around the Northern Powerhouse in general. Many senior figures report speculation that minister Jake Berry wants to set up a statutory body to oversee that, too – chipping away at the growing autonomy and advocacy northern leaders have crafted, by instead putting government in the driving seat.
So northern unity can still be a fragile unity.
Yet it remains, agrees everyone I speak to, essential to finally upgrading an archaic transport network in an era where most of the time, London still cannot hear us.
That will require the north to continue articulating its case as effectively as possible , including for power over its own transport budget, rather than endlessly going cap in hand to Whitehall, applying for piecemeal bits and bobs.
One thing that struck me when researching this piece was that every single official and senior politician I spoke to, anywhere in the north, made the same points, in the same language. Their analysis is consistent: we are being held back here by Whitehall’s abject failure to recognise our needs, or just how much the whole country – but especially the 16m people living here – could benefit if they just took their heads out of the green book.
These are points you rarely see made on national political programmes or in the comment pages of national newspapers, unless you make some serious impact.
Any hopes of doing that, of truly upgrading our hopeless transport network, are at a ‘critical juncture’, says one Greater Manchester figure, and represent a ‘crunch moment’ for TfN. If northern voices allow themselves to be undermined, tearing lumps out of northern officials at the same time, ‘the north will make a big mistake’, they suggest.
“But which government, of any colour, can ignore the whole of the north at this juncture, if we’re united?” they pose. “We have got to the business end of some of these transport schemes and compromises and trade-offs are probably going to be required. That gets a bit messy. But let’s not let that messiness break the whole.”
The unity is there. In reality, everyone here is on the same page. The question is whether we can carry on shouting loud enough for government to read it.
