After 12 years within the planning, the north’s flagship rail scheme nonetheless has no detailed design and a £45 billion price range that the general public accounts committee says was set earlier than anybody knew what it will construct.
The plan to remodel practice providers throughout the north of England is liable to sliding into the identical fiasco that has engulfed HS2, in response to parliament’s spending watchdog, which says the scheme nonetheless lacks a correct design and a sensible price range after greater than a decade of planning.
In a withering report, the Commons public accounts committee (PAC) mentioned Northern Powerhouse Rail had no detailed design to talk of after 12 years on the drafting board, and warned that its £45 billion price range had turn out to be “decoupled from actuality”. Because it stands, the committee mentioned, the challenge is more likely to fail to ship the enhancements promised and dangers changing into one more authorities infrastructure albatross.
Initially conceived as a high-speed line linking Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, the scheme has since been pared again to a collection of native upgrades meant to ship quicker and extra frequent providers. The federal government revived the programme in January with a phased £45 billion imaginative and prescient for the north, however the PAC is unconvinced the numbers stack up.
The committee mentioned it was “not assured that the Division for Transport (DfT) has learnt all the teachings from its previous failures in its administration of different rail tasks”, pointing above all to the truncated HS2 north-south hyperlink. HS2 has busted its price range and will value effectively in extra of £100 billion regardless of now working solely so far as Birmingham, and is predicted to be not less than 5 years late.
On the cash, the PAC was blunt. There was “no convincing plan” to ship Northern Powerhouse Rail’s goals inside the £45 billion cap, it mentioned, and no clarification of how the Treasury had arrived on the determine within the first place, with no formal design, scope or costing but revealed.
Clive Betts, the PAC’s deputy chair, mentioned there was little doubt that railways within the north wanted reworking to ship jobs, mobility and productiveness. However having taken proof from events, he warned: “Our committee has heard troubling echoes of the identical errors in unfastened governance that HS2 made early on.
“A lot of the challenge stays virtually impressionistic. Each the Treasury and DfT have inquiries to reply concerning the challenge’s £45 billion funding cap. We have to understand how this determine was arrived at and the way DfT will hold to it. Capping a challenge’s funding earlier than it was even designed or costed appears like placing a roof on a home earlier than the foundations are laid.”
Betts reserved specific scorn for the choice to let HS2 Ltd, the company set as much as ship HS2, advise on Northern Powerhouse Rail, calling it laughable {that a} physique with such a file of failure must be shaping the north’s subsequent large scheme.
The report lands as northern leaders press for a firmer dedication to the area. Higher Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, a vocal champion of devolution who has warned the north faces “Armageddon” with out correct rail hyperlinks, has continued to push for higher transport connections and a shift of energy away from Westminster.
The committee needs readability, and rapidly. It known as on the DfT, already stretched by HS2 and the creation of Nice British Railways, the brand new publicly managed operator, to entrance up: “Inside six months, the division ought to write to us to substantiate whether or not Northern Powerhouse Rail is a mega-project or not.”
That query issues as a result of the reply determines how the scheme is ruled, scrutinised and funded, and the committee’s frustration is that, 12 years in, it nonetheless can’t be answered. Ministers have additionally confronted strain over cheaper alternate options elsewhere on the community, together with a cut-price “HS2-light” line past Birmingham being weighed up by officers.
The Division for Transport pushed again firmly. “Northern Powerhouse Rail will ship the largest funding in rail connectivity in a technology, giving the north the transport hyperlinks it deserves and driving progress, jobs and funding throughout the area,” a spokesperson mentioned.
“NPR won’t repeat the errors of HS2, which is why we accepted all of the suggestions of the James Stewart overview and are taking a disciplined, phased strategy, finishing detailed technical work with all stakeholders earlier than fixing exact selections for main infrastructure.
“Since saying NPR in January, we now have labored carefully with mayors to take the challenge ahead. New joint partnership boards are already overseeing the following stage of growth and Community Rail has begun creating engineering designs.”
The total findings are set out within the PAC’s report on Northern Powerhouse Rail, which pulls on Nationwide Audit Workplace evaluation displaying the DfT may have spent some £410 million on the programme by March 2026. For a scheme meant to rebalance the financial system, the watchdog’s message is uncomfortable: design first, value second, and cap the price range solely as soon as what you might be constructing, relatively than the opposite approach spherical.
