Andrew Gilligan: Northern Powerhouse Rail won’t help the North, or power better transport. The Tories have got this wrong

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.

Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party likes to see itself as the hard-headed teller of difficult truths, the fearless critic of bad ideas and the maker of tough decisions. That’s exactly what it should be, what the country needs it to be, and what it sometimes actually is.

Not always, though. The Tory front bench’s first response to several seismically bad Labour ideas has been either fence-sitting (for instance, on digital ID) or feeble acquiescence (on the “Hillsborough law,” which risks making Whitehall ungovernable.)

The periodic woolly-mindedness of our time in government lingers. As we did then, we’re still backing some stupid policies because they “look good,” because some lobby group or celebrity wants them, or because opposing them might make us “look bad.”

The frontbench toughened up on rejecting digital ID – helping cause a swift government U-turn – but it now seems to be embracing a new stupid policy, a new politicians’ magic answer: “Northern Powerhouse Rail” (NPR). This project achieves the difficult feat of making HS2 seem quite sensible. It will be a high-speed line, from Liverpool to Manchester and possibly Leeds, on which trains can never reach high speeds, because the stations are too close together.

The Liverpool-Manchester stretch  – Labour’s priority – will cost at least £17bn, almost certainly closer to £30bn, but journeys between the two cities will actually take longer than the existing service. That’s because it runs via Manchester Airport – sort of. The “airport” station will actually be a mile from the airport; you’d have to transfer by bus.

Yet in last month’s Commons debate on carrying over the bill to build NPR – or part of it, at least – Jerome Mayhew, the shadow rail minister, criticised the Government for the “lack of progress” it was making on the scheme and asked accusingly: “What cuts will [the Transport Secretary] be forced to make, and are they to the high-speed section?”

Maybe we’re worried that opposing NPR would look anti-North. But NPR – though understandably beloved of the profit-scenting construction lobby, and the Labour mayors it has captured – is in fact a huge obstacle to giving the North the better transport it badly needs.

Public transport is a network. Creating better public transport does not mean grafting one new high-speed line, serving a handful of places, onto an otherwise still decrepit system. It means creating a better network, through hundreds of small and medium improvements as well as some large ones: bus, tram and local rail, not just inter-city.

The North’s main rail capacity problem is not on links – lines between cities – but at nodes: places where the trains converge, above all central Manchester. NPR would do little to fix this.

Most importantly, NPR is a fantasy: there will never be enough money, perhaps £70-100bn, to build the whole thing (Labour has just cancelled the northern half of the Midland Main Line electrification to save £1bn). It is described as “unachievable” by the Government’s own infrastructure watchdog. Every pound and every month wasted on a scheme that will never happen is time and money not spent on the things that will help more passengers, in more places, more quickly – and that have a chance of actually coming to pass.

Yes, I know – Boris Johnson, the PM I worked for, supported NPR. His view was that we could do that and all the other things as well. I opposed it, then and since, because I knew that at high-speed prices, you simply can’t. You have to choose, or at least to sequence – which is, in fact, what France and Germany did do, fixing their urban services before turning to the comparative luxury item of high-speed rail. On our current path, we’ll end up with neither.

And yes, I know – my other PM employer, Rishi Sunak, though he cancelled the northern section of HS2, said he would fund a new Liverpool-Manchester line and let the metro mayors decide the route. That was intended to give them scope to choose something better – such as a Manchester version of the “Elizabeth Line” to fix the city’s rail congestion – but they went for the lobbyist option instead.

Reform has come out against NPR. Maybe that’s another reason (an equally bad one) why the Tories appear for it. But if you think it’s a votewinner, you’re mistaken. The North has never wanted high-speed rail. It is transport for the few, not the many. As Richard Tice has said, the political elites’ obsession with high-speed schemes – rather than the services that most people actually use – is another symbol of how mainstream British politics became estranged, in so many ways, from ordinary voters’ real wishes and needs.

There’s still time for the party to get this right – and for Northern England to get more than a Labour press release.