Delaying the new Birmingham to Manchester railway until after HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail are delivered is not sensible sequencing – it is a gamble with the economic future of the North of England.
Ben Brittain, director of public affairs at Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE).
I had the privilege of travelling on the last direct train from Manchester to Birmingham on a recent Saturday night. That train departs at 9.25pm, a time when most families around the Mediterranean have barely sat down to dinner.
Between the second and third largest cities in Britain, that is the sum total of direct connectivity after early evening. It is a telling symbol of the infrastructure deficit this country has long tolerated outside of London.
As Andy Street’s former transport adviser, I have spent years making the case for HS2 and for serious regional transport investment.
I have learned that in infrastructure, delay is rarely neutral – it can snowball into further delays, until eventually its last stop is cancellation.
And the government’s decision to sequence the new Birmingham–Manchester rail line behind both HS2 Phase 1 and Northern Powerhouse Rail risks pushing this essential corridor into the 2040s, if it survives at all.
Rail minister Peter Hendy was right to tell the Lords that a new line between the West Midlands and Crewe may be needed sooner than Northern Powerhouse Rail, given the capacity crisis choking the West Coast Main Line (WCML).
The WCML is operating at or near its limits during peak periods, handling around 75M passengers a year alongside significant freight.
Punctuality on some WCML operators has fallen to as low as 2–5% of services running on time at peak hours.
That is not a railway in need of minor signalling adjustments, instead it shows a railway approaching systemic failure. Adding even a small number of new services, to ease congestion, risks destabilising the network and current timetabling.
The National Infrastructure Commission, now subsumed into the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, warned in its 2024 report that failing to upgrade rail infrastructure north of Birmingham, the area HS2 Phase 2 was designed to serve, is simply not sustainable.
The Public Accounts Committee has been equally blunt: the cancellation of the northern leg has rendered Phase 1 of HS2 in need of urgent, unanswered questions about the future of the wider programme.
The economic stakes and opportunities are vast. Closing the productivity gap between the Birmingham and Manchester city regions and the UK average would add approximately £43bn – around 2% – to the national economy annually.
Were these regions to match the performance of their European peer cities relative to their national averages, that figure could reach £70bn.
HS2 Phase 1, Midlands Rail Hub, and Northern Powerhouse Rail are all essential to unlocking that potential. But they are not sufficient on their own.
These projects are not silo projects that operate individually of each other; a connected strategic approach is needed. And critically, it is the connection between them – a fully joined-up north-south spine – that creates a transformation railway network greater than the sum of its parts.
The engineering case for a new line, as set out by Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE) member Arup and originally sanctioned by my former boss, is compelling on its own terms.
An entirely new, end-to-end greenfield railway offers the highest net benefits: a step-change in capacity, meaningful journey time improvements, and a network freed from the knock-on fragility of the existing WCML.
It would cost less than the previous HS2 scheme and carries genuine appeal to private investors, precisely because it avoids the complex interfaces with legacy infrastructure that drive cost overruns and schedule slippage elsewhere.
The government knows this and they are right to recognise its value. The Northern Growth Strategy explicitly sets out the intention to deliver a full north-south new line between Birmingham and Manchester.
The problem is the delivery timeline. The stated expectation that delivery timelines should follow the completion of HS2 and NPR is, at best, optimistic and, at worst, a slow-motion cancellation masquerading as a plan. My experience has made me quickly learn that projects that are perpetually downstream of other priorities have a tendency to never arrive.
Britain cannot afford another generation of infrastructure lost to dither and delay.
The Birmingham–Manchester corridor is not a nice-to-have addendum to HS2 and NPR – it is the critical missing spine of England’s rail network, that links HS2 to NPR. Without it, the ambitions of both programmes are fundamentally left wanting of their full transformational economic potential.
Lord Hendy’s instincts are sound. The Treasury should listen to its rail minister.
By Ben Brittain, former adviser to Andy Street, the Mayor of the West Midlands, and director of public affairs at Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE).
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