A government minister has declined to put on a date on when the revived Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) project might be finished, but warned that railway improvements “take a very long time”.
Speaking in a House of Lords debate on Monday (19 January), rail minister Lord Peter Hendy said the “benefits” from the scheme to improve links in the North of England will start to be felt in the 2030s.
But when pushed on the timetable by Baroness McIntosh of Pickering, Lord Hendy said: “I can’t tell her precisely when all the parts of the improvements will be delivered because… we do need to plan this out properly.
“Railway improvements, sadly, take a very long time. They take a long time to be delivered safely, unlike in the Victorian era when hundreds of people were killed during their construction.”
When the NPR plans were announced last week, reports suggested the project will not be finished until at least 2045.
Reacting to Lord Hendy’s latest comments, the Civil Engineering Contractors Association (CECA) urged the government to give a “clear delivery timetable” for the project as it is “essential for industry to invest and deliver”.
The body’s director of policy and public affairs Ben Goodwin told Construction News: “The government may wish to avoid becoming a hostage to fortune through naming a completion date.
“Nonetheless, the reality is that the key to delivering NPR will be to maintain momentum, and allow industry to plan to get spades in the ground on a clear timetable.
“If NPR is to finally move from an aspiration to improving people’s lives and life chances, we need to see tangible steps to transform rhetoric into real work – and to provide the UK’s civil engineering community the confidence they need to get on with the job.”
The NPR proposals include spending up to £45bn connecting cities from Liverpool to Newcastle as part of a three-stage plan. A new line connecting Liverpool to Manchester is included as part of the proposals.
The government plans to spend £1.1bn on the project up to 2029, with a “cap” of £45bn on spending after that.
Asked whether the £45bn would be uprated for inflation Lord Hendy said the funding would be in “2026 pounds”. He added: “We’ve been accounting for HS2 in 2019 prices for a number of years, which is clearly a ridiculous proposition”.
While HS2 has repeatedly faced budget overruns, Lord Hendy pushed back on the idea that NPR will face the same issues.
“Let’s not assume that the cap [on NPR] will be busted,” he said. “The progress on the Transpennine route upgrade demonstrates pretty satisfactorily that, actually planned properly, you can make really substantial railway enhancements without limitless additions to the budget.”
The government has also said it intends to build a new line between Birmingham and Manchester, but that it will not be a “reinstatement” of HS2, whose northern leg was cancelled under the previous administration.
On Monday, Lord Hendy confirmed that the government is retaining land between the West Midlands and Crewe because “at some stage a railway will have to be built” to tackle capacity issues.
He added: “It will probably not be a high-speed railway. It is certainly not a railway to the specification of High Speed 2 phase 1, which has cost an extraordinary amount of money because of its specification.”
Plans to improve rail links in the North of England were first unveiled nearly 11 years ago by the then Conservative government, but failed to come to fruition.
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James Wilmore