Sir Keir Starmer will doom the North to “Armageddon” unless he completes an extension of HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester, Andy Burnham has said.
Mr Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said that a decision by the previous government to terminate the new high-speed rail link in Birmingham would force many northern trains to run even more slowly than they do at present.
He urged the Prime Minister to reverse the Tories’ decision to scrap the plan entirely and instead commit to a cheaper version of the original proposal.
Speaking on the fringes of the Labour Party Conference, Mr Burnham said: “The danger is doing nothing. Because if HS2 trains start rolling north through Birmingham and on to the West Coast Main Line we are looking at Armageddon.
“The system is simply not set up to deal with those trains. It’s hard to believe, but we would end up with a worse train service than we’ve currently got. We would have fewer seats and they would go at lower speeds than the Pendolinos.
“This is not acceptable.”
HS2 was originally meant to link London to Manchester but was scaled back by Rishi Sunak in 2023 to save £36bn. The decision triggered outrage in the North after a years-long campaign to improve regional transport links.
HS2 trains will run in formations of two sets of carriages on the new scaled-back line. However, they will be reduced to a single set when running on the West Coast Main Line from Birmingham onwards, where stations are unable to accommodate the double-length trains.
Unlike the tilting Pendolinos, the HS2 trains will also be unable to negotiate the main line’s curves at high speed, slowing them down once they leave their dedicated tracks.
Mr Burnham said: “This is not about being unrealistic and it’s not about reviving HS2. But if we leave things as they are then this is an anti-growth strategy.
“The West Coast Main Line is pretty much full and the M6 motorway is definitely full. We have to have a 21st-century rail network.”
Otherwise, Mr Burnham said, Britain will be “sleepwalking toward a transport nightmare”.
Mr Burnham is pushing for Sir Keir and Chancellor Rachel Reeves to approve a blueprint for what he says will be a lower-cost alternative to the northern leg of HS2 resulting from work he commissioned with former West Midlands mayor Andy Street.
The proposal for a 50-mile Midlands-Northwest Rail Link, running from the northern end of HS2 near Lichfield, north of Birmingham, to High Legh, near Warrington, was unveiled this month.
The plan would rely on investment from the private sector and would connect the regions “at a fraction of the costs” of HS2, its backers say.
Mr Burnham said: “We have to join these dots. We’ve got a new line that the last government was committed to across the North, and we’ve got HS2 to Birmingham. That missing piece of the jigsaw has to be put in.
“You can’t have the UK’s second and third cities divided like this.”
He said he is encouraged by comments from Sir Keir last week, when the Prime Minister said that the Government would “look at” the new plan and hinted that it could be taken forward to a “feasibility study”.
Mr Burnham said that the Department for Transport also appeared to have concluded that the WCML would be full by the mid-2030s.
Mr Burnham’s warning comes after the National Audit Office said in July that scrapping of the northern leg of HS2 raised capacity issues that the Government needed to address.
Otherwise, it said, passengers would have to be put off from travelling by train once HS2 opens, most likely by raising ticket prices at peak times.
A report from former Siemens UK boss Juergen Maier commissioned by Labour has also called for much of the HS2 network that was controversially abandoned by Mr Sunak last October to be revived.
The report said that without a new rail route from Birmingham to Manchester the existing infrastructure would face “collapse.”
Mr Burnham said that upgrading the WCML was not an option as it would be “highly disruptive” and, unlike a new line, fail to create capacity for more freight trains and take trucks off the roads.
He added that he also favoured extending HS2 from an initial London terminus at Old Oak Common into Euston Station, and that “people in the North of England should be able to get into the heart of our capital city”.
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