UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has confirmed he is cancelling phase two of the long-standing high-speed rail network project, High Speed 2 (HS2). This comes two years after the government scrapped the eastern Leeds branch of the project.
In a speech to the Conservative conference in Manchester, Sunak promised that “every single penny” from the £36bn he says will be saved by scrapping the Manchester leg of the rail network will, instead, be spent on hundreds of transport and connectivity projects around the country. Included in those he listed were revamped motorways, resurfaced roads, new stations and keeping the £2 bus fare in place for the whole of the country.
We asked the University of Liverpool’s Tom Arnold, an expert on regional policy and infrastructure at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, to explain what this means for the north of England.
