Announcing big ideas at a party conference is quite easy. Delivering them is rather more difficult. As Liz Truss showed us to such devastating effect last year. So we are entitled to look closely at the detail of Rishi Sunak’s announcements and ask a few hard questions. In particular, we are entitled to look at how realistic all these grand promises really are.
On the face of it, any reasonable person would have to say that some of the transport projects that he is now putting forward sound very promising. If we really do get a brand-new station in Bradford and a fast new line to Manchester it will be fantastic. If a West Yorkshire-wide tram system rapidly and efficiently links the big towns and cities then it will be a huge boost for the economy and a massive gain for local people. It would be brilliant to see Hull properly connected, Rotherham get a new station, and Stocksbridge linked conveniently to Sheffield. Add to that more bus routes and cheaper fares and you have a very attractive package.
Almost everyone in a northern town or city has been told what they want to hear. The devil is that there is no detail. Just wild assertions and scattergun costings that can’t be relied on.
HS2 predictably run into the ground
At the start of the HS2 project many warned that it would do significant environmental damage whilst the costs would spiral out of control. They also predicted that those costs would suck up so much of the available resources that there would be little left for other important schemes. The Green Party was particularly clear from the very first moment it was announced that it was a vanity project that was unlikely to be a success.
Those predictions now look like wisdom before the event. HS2 costs were calculated before the land had been properly surveyed and without taking sensible account of the need to spend money on avoiding severe damage to particular local communities or environmental treasures.
Instead of learning from that mistake the government is repeating it. All those fine promises about delivering projects to the North have been astonishingly loosely costed. Read the 40-page document which is supposed to give the details about what is happening and you will discover that it is not a well-thought-through, careful business case, but a propaganda pamphlet.
Numbers are scattered through it like confetti in the most unconvincing way. Paragraph 48 for example boldly announces that:
“We will provide new money everywhere outside the big city regions. We are creating a brand new £2.5bn fund to transform local transport in 14 rural counties, smaller cities and towns in every part of the North outside the big city regions.”
No transparency, no consultation, no clue
New money everywhere is about as implausible as it is possible to get. We’ve been told that there will be £2bn for the new station and better connections for Bradford. Which is great. We haven’t been told the details about where the station will be, how the existing lines will be connected and what the detailed challenges will be of getting a better service across the Pennines.
The plans have been drawn up in attempts at great secrecy by officials in London without any proper consultation with northern Mayors and their teams of experts about local transport issues. They are so rushed that they include a promise to deliver a new tram service to Manchester airport that already exists.
There is little or nothing in the document that tells us when all the good things that are promised will actually happen. HS2 was firmly included in three Conservative Party manifestos. It got dumped because of cost over-runs and a lack of attention to detail. How can anyone in the North be confident that the same won’t happen this time around?
The plethora of nice sounding things that are being promised are long into the future. Detailed plans will need to be developed, consultations held, planning meetings conducted and difficulties for particular local communities addressed. That takes time. During which ambitions encounter hard facts.
Promises or propaganda?
It is well over a decade since HS2 was announced and, despite years of work, nothing is now going to be delivered in the North. What are the chances of the grand schemes that are now being announced with such a flourish actually getting delivered? How long will it be before the projects that do stack up are actually built? How much further would we be along the line of delivery if the government had listened to northern voices and started high-speed rail across the North instead of doing a lot of very expensive work in the south?
The North of England needs more than nice-sounding pre-election promises. It deserves better than a fresh round of assertions that it will be levelled up. It needs control over its own economic development and the money that can achieve it.
What we are getting instead are wild assertions that all our transport ambitions are going to be achieved. Whilst the single most significant transport project that was seriously planned for the North just got cancelled.
It is unlikely that this year’s set of wildly unrealistic promises will prove as big a disaster as last year’s but it is grotesquely unlikely that events will match up to the propaganda. Because reality has a very nasty way of clashing with over-ambitious hopes of Conservative prime ministers.
