Business leaders battling plans for a surface turnback station at Manchester Piccadilly have slammed a Government continuing to ‘run roughshod’ over the Northern Powerhouse promises made eight years ago.
It was on June 23 2014, that then-Chancellor George Osborne made his 'Northern Powerhouse' speech at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Manchester. He spoke of how, combined, the northern cities of this country could 'take on the world'. He also described at length how the government would enable this. A high speed route between Manchester and Leeds and and the second phase of HS2 came front and centre of the plan.
Eight years later, and the Manchester Evening News has launched another campaign around a transport project which has been through the Department for Transport and come out worse for wear. This time, it's the plan for the HS2 station at Manchester Piccadilly.
The proposal, say leaders here, will turn swathes of the city centre into a building site, blight land with viaducts and fail to future-proof the capacity, reliability and resilience on the rail network that passengers so desperately need. Manchester City Council’s analysis, meanwhile, shows that the loss of valuable land will cost 14,000 potential jobs, while the overground station will rob the economy of the North of £333m a year up to 2050. Meanwhile, Greater Manchester is expected to pay for an HS2 station at Manchester Airport.
And yet the many pleas for the preferred option of an underground through-station, from political and civic leaders, as well as businesses and passengers have, up to the second reading of the bill this week, gone unanswered. On Monday rail minister Wendy Morton rejected calls for an underground solution describing the - so far unsubstantiated - £5bn cost as a ‘crazy amount of money’, despite a £4bn overspend on London’s Crossrail.
Ms Morton also said tunnelling would cause ‘major city centre disruption’, delay the opening of services into Manchester by ‘more than seven years’ and potentially lead to an extra 350,000 HGV journeys during construction.
But business leaders here have vowed to keep pushing against the cut-price plan to build a hub on 500,000 sq metres of prime development land. Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said businesses here were tired of 'broken promises'.
Referring to the impact a surface station could have on Manchester’s ‘Innovation District’ - a £1.5bn development venture from the University of Manchester and Bruntwood SciTech, in the centre of Manchester - Mr Murison added: “This emerging quarter will dwarf the success of the Oxford Road corridor and bring investment and research and development innovation to the region. But we don’t want to lose the huge pocket of land next to that as this will naturally expand over the coming decades.”
He said losing an underground through-station would be a blow not only to HS2 but also for Northern Powerhouse Rail - the east-west links which were downgraded in last year’s Integrated Rail Plan. Crucially, a turn-back surface station, rather than an underground through-hub, means NPR could not be brought back to life in the future as the hub will hit full capacity from day one.
Mr Murison added: “There are lots of reasons why HS2 should be underground but most relate to NPR and that makes it a much more compelling case. Manchester is a global city, the north of England needs a decent railway.”
He said the ‘accumulative approach’ to transport by the Government had ‘upset a lot of people’, adding: “The Government isn’t doing just one thing to upset businesses in Greater Manchester - first it cut NPR to Leeds, now the HS2 station at Piccadilly and the station at the airport, there’s no certainty this will even be built because we’ve not got the money.
“The Government clearly thinks this isn’t a priority and Manchester should feel lucky with what it’s getting. The problem is that the economic benefits of this railway are eroding, they are cutting costs in the northern sections to cover up their own mistakes."
Mr Murison added: “The DfT needs to look in the mirror at where the budget has been overextended elsewhere. The responsibility sits with them and we are being asked to accept second best because of their incompetence.
“We’ve had broken promises, second class answers. Eight years after George Osbone committed to the Northern Powerhouse and a shared ambition between leaders, civic leaders, Government and businesses has been run roughshod over by this Government.”
Lou Cordwell, Chair of Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership, meanwhile, described the plan for a surface turnback station as ‘hugely shortsighted’ and said the resulting viaducts would make parts of East Manchester ‘impermeable’ for many decades, undermining levelling up opportunities in the process.
She added: "Overall it’s a less efficient and less resilient way of operating rail services. The underground option will give us a seamless onward connectivity and lower operational risk.
"In other words, we need to invest in a modern solution that puts us on a par with other leading European cities, shows the world that the Government is committed to its levelling up agenda and that we’re serious about being a globally significant economy.
“We must invest in a future-proofed underground option that is designed to last 100-plus years and empowers us to deliver the growth we know can be unlocked.
"An underground through-station will make the right statement for a city of Manchester’s ambition and profile. We’re home to one of the new Innovation Accelerators and a future key player in the global innovation ecosystem - with a longstanding innovation heritage, after all Manchester was home to the first inter-city railway in the world. For this reason we’d like to see value and affordability evaluated on the basis of the whole-life return to the Greater Manchester and UK economy.”
Chris Oglesby, chief executive of Bruntwood, described the £330m benefit to the region of an overground station as 'conservative', arguing that the Innovation District and Mayfield needed to link effectively with the new HS2 station and through to major investment in Ancoats and the Etihad Campus.
An underground station would 'unlock' the vision of the Northern Powerhouse, he said - linking the cities of the M62 corridor in a 'single market and labour pool'.
A Department for Transport spokesman said: "We have worked with stakeholders and Greater Manchester partners from the outset and throughout the design stages of HS2, to deliver the best solution for the region.
“Our analysis found that an underground station would cause major disruption during construction and take passengers longer to reach platforms, cancelling out the benefits of faster journeys, all at an additional cost of up to £5 billion while significantly delaying the introduction of full HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail services.”
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