Statement from the Mayor of Greater Manchester on the National Audit Office HS2 report

The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, provided the following statement on the National Audit Office's (NAO) report: "HS2: update following cancellation of Phase 2" (opens in new window).

Today’s report from the National Audit Office (NAO) shines a spotlight on the consequences of cancelling the northern leg of HS2 and backs up what we have been saying.

By the Department for Transport’s assessment, the West Coast Main Line will be at capacity by the mid-2030s. Not doing anything to address this would be a brake on growth.

As Mayor of Greater Manchester, I will never accept the message to the public being “don’t travel to Greater Manchester by rail”.

Anyone who currently travels on the West Coast Main Line on a regular basis knows how chaotic it can be. It cannot take all those additional HS2 trains in its current state. As the NAO points out, they would have to be shorter trains, so there would be fewer seats, and they would go slower.

The idea that we are going to make rail services worse by the middle of the century is a complete non-starter – a different plan is needed. This is an urgent problem that needs a coherent solution.

No-one is talking about going back to HS2, but there has to be additional capacity between the West Midlands and Greater Manchester. This could be done through expanding and upgrading the West Coast Main Line, although the NAO warns that this would be very disruptive. I see a new, lower-cost, dedicated line as the only real solution.

It would therefore be a mistake for the government to have a fire sale of the land it has bought to build HS2. Around £600m has already been spent, there is no way the government would recover that value. The best thing is to use that land to pave the way for the new line.

Article Published: 23/07/2024 18:03 PM