Labour recommits to Northern Powerhouse Rail – but no promise to deliver HS2

Labour’s shadow transport secretary has re-stated the party’s commitment to building Northern Powerhouse Rail but could not make the same promise on the second phase of HS2.

Support for both projects have been longstanding party policy and were included in the most recent manifesto blueprint prepared by the National Policy Forum.

But support for building HS2 in full has wavered among the Labour leadership in recent weeks, with fears, confirmed last week, that rumoured government cuts to the scheme could salt the earth for future completion of the scheme.

In a speech to the party conference earlier today, Louise Haigh said it was “not the skill and ingenuity of British workers and British industry that is the problem [but] the chaos and incompetence of the Conservatives”.

“We will work with our local leaders, our mayors, businesses and unions to deliver a credible and transformative programme of transport infrastructure including Northern Powerhouse Rail within our fiscal rules,” she added.

Her avoidance of any commitment to building the second phase of HS2 conflicted with a vote on the conference floor yesterday.

Delegates in Liverpool approved a motion which called on the party to commit to the high-speed rail running to Manchester and Leeds.

It also marks a shift in rhetoric for Haigh herself, who, had confirmed Labour that still supported HS2 – later contradicted by shadow cabinet minister Pat McFadden – when rumours first emerged about planned cuts.

In a fringe meeting yesterday with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, Haigh blamed Tory ”incompetence, indecision and weakness” for the current state of the project and said lessons must be learned.

Haigh said: “Our international competitors enjoy and have enjoyed for decades the kind of high speed rail networks that the last Labour government left with a plan for this Conservative government to deliver and over the last 13 years they have mismanaged, they have let the costs run out of control, they have delayed and they have blown a massive, massive hole in that project.”

She described Rishi Sunak’s offer to reinvest funds earmarked for HS2’s northern leg in road and rail upgrades in the North as giving the impression of ”a plan drawn up in crayon by a bunch of advisors that have never left London”.

Haigh also said Labour would take a “fundamentally different” approach to the Conservatives by including northern leaders in transport decisions.

Labour’s public re-commitment to NPR will likely please Burnham, who, speaking at the same event yesterday, called for the original pre-covid plans for the scheme to be built in full.

The original £39bn plan for Northern Powerhouse Rail, drawn up before the covid pandemic by Transport for the North (TfN), was scaled back in the government’s long-delayed integrated rail plan in 2021 and replaced with a £23bn line which skipped Bradford.

The Greater Manchester mayor suggested that a land value capture mechanism could help fund the project.