Northern Powerhouse Rail ‘won’t be procured’ before design completed

The transport secretary has promised to fully design Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) before tendering for contractors.

Heidi Alexander pledged in the House of Commons on Monday (2 February) to finalise the scope of works for the relauched £45bn project first and vowed to avoid “the same mistakes as the previous government”.

“We will not be letting contracts when we have not defined the scope of works,” she said.

In response to a question from Liberal Democrat transport spokesperson Olly Glover about learning lessons from HS2, Alexander said the previous Conservative government “gave the go-ahead to HS2 when they did not know what they were asking the contractors to build”.

The government set out its plan to resurrect NPR last month using a bill designed for a now cancelled portion of HS2, between Crewe and Manchester.

It has issued assurances that NPR will not mirror the same path as HS2, after its chief executive Mark Wild last year admitted construction work on the high-speed rail project began “too fast”, risking project inefficiencies.

Last year, Wild criticised the way HS2 had proceeded, adding that the client, HS2 Ltd, “really didn’t have the maturity of design and consenting” at that time.

“If you’re designing something in the morning and trying to build it in the afternoon, you end up with a lot of inefficiency,” he added.

In an overhaul, last June, treasury officials pledged to have separate construction and design phase budgets for major infrastructure projects going forward to ensure design work was complete before launching construction work.