It was a generational chance to deal with the imbalances that have persisted since the 1980s. While London accelerated – powered by the engine of the City, a comprehensive transport system and the country’s transition to a service economy – the deindustrialised great cities of the north, such as Manchester, fell behind.
Manchester’s story, in the last 40 years, has been of a long and successful battle to reinvent itself. The city has always been a hive of innovation, culture and development, but for a period, post-industrial torpor overshadowed it. We’ve emerged from that and we’re booming. But there is still lots of work to be done to make sure those gains are permanent and are shared. And we can’t do that without transport and infrastructure investment.
And yet, without consulting Greater Manchester, in an announcement made with grim irony in a former railway interchange in Manchester, Rishi Sunak smiled as he cancelled our leg of HS2.
The line would run from London to Birmingham but would then stop, he said. It would not come to Manchester. No compromise for the capital, though, with HS2 starting at Euston rather than six miles away at Old Oak Common.
It isn’t as if the significance of the decision isn’t understood by Sunak’s party. In 2014 George Osborne, then the chancellor, made a speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry. He described HS2 as a “vital investment”, providing “essential capacity” – promising “it will change the economic geography of the country”.
Five years later the prime minister, Theresa May, reiterated the government’s commitment, and then in 2020, Boris Johnson made a speech in the Commons in which he said the country faced a historic choice.
“We can try to get by with the existing route between north and south, condemning the next generation to overcrowding and standing up – or we can make the decision, no matter how difficult and controversial, that will deliver prosperity to every part of the country,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong about that. Seven million people live in the north-west, yet the rail transport infrastructure is abysmal. You can’t rely on a train between Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool because there’s every possibility that it will be cancelled or delayed.
There was a promise to transform these connections though a new east-west high-speed route – “Northern Powerhouse” rail – announced by Osborne a decade ago and then scaled back.
The National Audit Office has been critical of delays to an upgrade of the current route between Manchester and Leeds, announced in 2011, with £190m wasted.
And, 10 years ago, extra platforms were promised at Piccadilly, Manchester’s Euston, to alleviate crippling congestion. Plans were announced, then changed, before being axed this year. Meanwhile, the Elizabeth line in London has been built at a cost of £18bn. It’s only now, after years of a fragmented, privatised bus service, that we’re beginning to work towards a Transport for London-style, integrated system.
So basically, we’ve been here before.
The reason why this matters is because lopsided transport policy leads to lopsided economic outcomes – which isn’t good for the country and isn’t even good for London. A wider spread of economic opportunities promises to improve quality of life everywhere, instead of a Hunger Games-type battle for housing and services in those parts of the country where they are unfairly concentrated.
In a letter to the Times, David Higgins, a former HS2 chairman, said: “The whole objective of this major investment has been forgotten … Why are so few FTSE companies based outside the south-east? Why is there such a brain drain of graduates from the north? Why do northern cities underperform compared with their counterparts? Imagine four cities – Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, London – 15 million people, three international airports all linked with a reliable service.”
It isn’t just the failure to accept the economic case that leaves a bitter taste. It’s the way decision-making is so centralised in a country where challenges vary from place to place.
Investment was already planned on the basis of HS2, land had already been acquired and the construction of the Manchester leg of the project was expected to provide 17,500 jobs in the north-west. A group of large businesses, including Kraft Heinz and Manchester United, wrote to the prime minister ahead of the announcement, suggesting it would be a “major act of self-sabotage” and would “damage our international standing as a place to do business”.
Sunak has pledged that the money saved would be ploughed into transport projects across the north and Midlands (although it wouldn’t be available until the end of the decade). The £12bn announced for the Manchester to Liverpool upgrade is not new, and we have to hope it doesn’t get taken away at some point. If the new Network North means that some elements of the previously scaled-back trans-Pennine plan will be revived then that is welcome, but this – and cash for potholes – is not enough to fundamentally rebalance the UK. There are unending demands on the public purse, but something has to change about the way our country is structured. A wealthier, more economically productive north, with Greater Manchester at its heart, will lead to a stronger country.
We need the government to see the north, not looking at us from London, but looking at the capital from “up here”, where the view is very different.
HS2 has its share of detractors, and there are some who have never understood the point of spending so much money. Neither can we ignore the impact that the now-cancelled leg would have had on those in the region who feared for their homes, for the peace of their suburbs and villages, or the environment.
But what’s interesting about the last week or so is that many of our readers have seen it as another example of the north losing out in a way the capital never does. They see an injustice playing out. Some also see a country that has become too reliant on Victorian infrastructure, a country in danger of falling behind through political blindness and an attachment to short-term gain.
Perhaps for Conservative voters in the shires, the prime minister’s decision seems like a sensible diversion of public money. But in a significant part of the north – which includes a fair few “red wall” seats – it feels like a betrayal.
Sarah Lester is the editor of the Manchester Evening News