Rail minister Lord Hendy admitted that a new rail line between the West Midlands and Crewe might be needed sooner than Northern Powerhouse Rail, due to capacity issues on the West Coast Main Line.
Phase 2a of HS2 was intended to build a new high-speed railway between Birmingham and Crewe that would have alleviated considerable capacity constraints on the West Coast line. This was cancelled along with the rest of phase two by the previous Government – but the current Government has kept hold of the land.
Speaking in a debate on Northern Powerhouse Rail, Lord Hendy, a transport minister said the Government was retaining that part of the land between the West Midlands and Crewe that it had because at some stage a railway will have to be built.
He told the House of Lords: “It will probably not be a high-speed railway. It is certainly not a railway to the specification of high speed two phase one, which has cost an extraordinary amount of money because of its specification.
“It is clear that the West Coast Main Line is full of trains. There is no space left.
“The Office of Rail and Road declined all the open access applications last summer, simply because there was no timetable space on the railway to accommodation them.”
A new line would also help HS2. Its services will have to join the West Coast Mai Line before Shugborough Tunnel, a bottleneck where the tracks reduce from four to two that is already at capacity.
A new line to Crewe would enable trains to join the line north of this bottleneck.
Lord Hendy told the House of Lords: “This Government is drawing a line under some uncosted and, frankly, undeliverable plans, of which Network North was the worst, although the integrated rail plan for the North came near it, because there was a little bit of funding but it was not prioritised in any way.
“We are setting out a realistic plan for the delivery of a better railway for the north of England, which will include more frequent trains — so frequent that you do not need a timetable — more reliable trains, faster journey times and a mixture of using existing lines, upgrading existing lines and, as has been pointed out, a new railway between Liverpool and Manchester.”
He said the plan was being phased. On the east side of the Pennines, improvements can come more quickly because the upgrading will be to existing lines. The line across the Pennines was already being “significantly upgraded”, he said, and the trans-Pennine route upgrade would see £11 billion-worth of railway improvements carried out, with capacity, electrification, reliability and journey time improvements.
“The plan then sets out a new railway between Liverpool and Manchester, using the northern part of the stalled powers for HS2, which are languishing in Parliament at the moment, together with a new railway from Millington to Liverpool,” he said.
Upgrades will be made later from Bradford to Manchester and Sheffield to Manchester.
“The Government believes that the plan, set out in that way, is much more deliverable and practical than any previous plan has been,” he said.
Former Lichfield and Tamworth MP Lord Grocott “warmly welcomed” the link from Crewe to Manchester in the NPR.
“Welcome as these improvements to east-west connectivity are — they are very welcome and probably should be taking precedence — they will not in any way help to solve the capacity problems on the west coast main line, which are being solved in part as far as Birmingham but need to be solved between the West Midlands and Manchester as well.
“What hope can the minister offer me that a new railway — he can call it HS2 or whatever he likes — will be built to replace HS2 to Manchester and correct the huge mistake that was made when it was cancelled?”¬
Lord Birt said that when he worked at No. 10 as Tony Blair’s strategy adviser in 2005 when an in-principle go-ahead was given to an ambitious high-speed rail network for the whole country.
“Twenty-odd years later, we do not even have one small part of that plan in place. In the same period, since 2008 China has built 48,000 kilometres of high-speed rail,” he said.
