Why does the North need a new rail network to power up its economy? Here are seven reasons why the UK needs to prioritise building Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR).
The Industrial Revolution began in the North of England. It powered growth first in the great cities and counties in the North, then throughout the kingdom and across the world.
The Victorians understood what would help them to build that revolution – the railways.
It was the railways that spurred trade between the Victorian powerhouse of the North of England and the rest of the country. But the North’s rail network is no longer fit for purpose. The main lines down to London have received significant investment but the east-west connections and the east coast up to Newcastle have not. They just don’t have the capacity and frequency to allow for the economic potential in the North to be realised.
It is like the Northern economy is constrained in a straightjacket of poor infrastructure. Transport for the North has a 30-year plan to address this and to tackle the gap in productivity through investment. We need to throw the straightjacket off and NPR will allow us to do this.
Building Northern Powerhouse Rail will mean many thousands of skilled people will be needed to design, to manage, to integrate, to build and to maintain the new network. These will be well-paid skilled jobs, which will help to level up the economy.
And once the network is built it will power growth in the North following the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to an uplift in gross value added to the economy of £3.4 billion a year and adding up to 35,000 more jobs in our city centres.
For decades the investment in our railways has been characterised by a stop-start approach, where skills are built up but then dispensed with once a project comes to an end. NPR looks to end that.
By setting in train a significant pipeline of investment in our railways we will be also building the skills which will help us to succeed in an ever more competitive world market.
Building a hi-tech digital railway for the 21st Century and beyond will help to breed innovation that can offer solutions to the British economy and which can be exported to the wider world.
How can it be right that you can travel from Manchester to London quicker than you can travel from Manchester to Hull? A journey that is considerably shorter. Or from London to Paris quicker than Liverpool to Newcastle? Is it right that the journey from Bradford to Leeds, a distance of just eight miles, should take almost half an hour?
NPR will increase the number of people able to reach four or more Northern cities within an hour from 10,000 today to 1.3m.
It would knit together the Northern cities so they function as one economic unit, rather than separate entities. That will help growth and productivity, leading to more inward investment, and a virtuous circle of a prosperous North would be set in motion.
Northern Powerhouse Rail will be virtually a fully electric railway. That means it will be capable of moving both people and heavy goods on our tracks using low-carbon energy. It therefore will play a major role in the decarbonisation of the UK economy, helping the country reach its goal of net-zero carbon by 2050.
Dirty, heavy diesel trains will be replaced with cleaner, greener electric ones. And it makes economic sense too. The cost of electrification will be more than offset by lower capital costs of electric trains and lower energy, operating and maintenance costs.
And of course, it will contribute to cleaner air and a cleaner planet. Estimates made in the early part of NPR’s development calculated that up to 64,000 cars could be taken off the region’s roads every single day. A breath of fresh air.
You only have to look at the area north of Kings Cross/St Pancras to see how major new transport links can have a transformative effect.
The area around the terminus of HS1 was once a dirty, run-down area but is now the home to gleaming new shops and offices. It has become a sought-after residential area and home to research and education too.
Huge plans have also been drawn up for the area around Curzon Street in Birmingham, which will be where the city’s HS2 station will be sited. NPR can have a similar regenerative effect. Pumping new life and investment into the towns and cities served by the new infrastructure.
Northern city regions are already drawing up their own ambitious plans which will see the economic effects of NPR piping new life into the heart of our urban spaces, helping them to shine and thrive for many years to come.
NPR is not just a rail network for the next 20 years, but for the next 100 years and beyond. We rightly revere the ingenuity and foresight of the Victorians in building the infrastructure that formed the backbone of the British economy for so long.
But that infrastructure is more than 150 years old. It is time for renewal. This is the best opportunity to reequip the North’s creaking infrastructure and revive its economy.
For too long the country has been running on one engine, that of the South East. Both HS2 and NPR will be transformational. They will be key pieces of world-class infrastructure that will deliver a step change and allow the UK to level up its national economy and to power it for generations to come.