West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin has said the Government’s scaled down HS2 plans “can only feel like they have run out of money”.
The Government sparked a backlash in November with its Integrated Rail Plan (IRP), as northern leaders hit out at the downgraded plans for the HS2 high-speed line and the east-west Northern Powerhouse Rail network.
Giving evidence to the Transport Select Committee in Leeds on Thursday, Labour Mayor Ms Brabin said the news had been “frustrating and disappointing”.
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She told MPs: “We found out when everybody else found out.
“We are as perplexed as so many others, we don’t quite understand why – when the Government has spent many millions of pounds investing in TFN and their expertise to develop a sequence of options, that the most sub-optimal option was chosen.
“It can only feel like they have run out of money because the added value is so huge and clearly with Government targets on levelling up and on climate emergency, we can only assume it is cost.”
According to the plan, the eastern leg of HS2 will stop at East Midlands Parkway, but trains will then run on an existing line to Sheffield and £100 million will be spent on a study that will “look at the most effective way to run HS2 trains to Leeds”.
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Ms Brabin said: “It is a disappointment that we are losing all those thousands of jobs, those thousands of homes that we were planning on.”
She added: “Every year HS2 isn’t built we lose £1.7 billion worth of growth across the region and it is impactful.
“There’s also going to be an element that is unquantifiable which is about opportunity. The talent in our region, will they have the opportunity to those great jobs, to those colleges?”
Describing some of the responses to an outreach programme she had run, Ms Brabin said: “A digital business can’t get the staff because people don’t want to commute across the Pennines, partners getting home from work at 10.45pm, a student at Leeds whose train from Liverpool takes over two hours, the same amount of time it took his dad in the 60s and his grandfather in the 30s.
“We can’t necessarily quantify the missed opportunity.”
The mayor told the committee: “It is a once in a generation opportunity to tackle the challenges of this Victorian infrastructure that we can’t continue to live with if we are going to level up, if we are going to reach our potential as a region.”