Time is money and it’s being wasted in the north

Because I’m a regional policy nerd, the part of Jeremy Hunt’s March Budget speech that caught my attention was not about pension rule changes, but the promise of “12 potential Canary Wharfs” outside London, via the creation of new investment zones.

The chancellor’s analogy inadvertently highlights the chronic policy failure holding back UK cities beyond the capital: transport.

The seeds of the London dockland development’s success may have originated in Michael Heseltine’s low-tax “urban enterprise zone”. But it also benefited from the wildly expensive Jubilee line extension, completed in the late 1990s. The bill for the Tube project was more than £3bn.

Leeds, which has been earmarked for one of these new Canary Wharfs, remains the biggest city in Europe to lack a mass transit system. When Boris Johnson, then prime minister, unveiled his integrated rail plan in November 2021, he promised the city that ministers would finally work up a plan for a network, in exchange for removing Leeds from England’s scaled-back and delayed high-speed railway.

But while a plan is being worked on, a funding mechanism with which to deliver the Leeds equivalent of the Jubilee line boon remains elusive.

Such issues underpinned last week’s report on local funding by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, which suggested a French-style hypothecation of national insurance: retain 1p at local level and put it towards mega-projects. A long-term guaranteed income stream would give mayors something to borrow against; it is why the mayors of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands argued for business rates retention for “levelling-up zones” over 25 years, an argument they won in the Budget.

Nevertheless, even though for people in the north the argument seems self-evident, there is a battle to convince government that major transport investment outside London is economically desirable.

Perhaps it is because the bleak reality and economic impact of transport connections serving Leeds and other northern cities are hard to appreciate if you’re not using them. The performance of Transpennine Express, the operator serving the north of England, is now so appalling that it has become a running joke. This month, West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin was late for a conference about the state of northern transport after a string of trains from Leeds to Newcastle were cancelled overnight.

A government decision on TPE’s contract is due imminently but in the meantime Tom Forth, head of data at Leeds-based Open Innovations, has done some calculations to quantify the cost of the chaos.

The effective population of Leeds would, he estimates, have been 44 per cent larger if TPE wasn’t cancelling nearly one in four of its trains, as it did in January, and its economy would be 5.5 per cent larger. “Time is money,” he says. Every hour someone stands on a platform has a cost for Leeds, northern England and UK plc.

In a report on regional economic inequality last month, the academics Anna Stansbury and Dan Turner, along with former shadow chancellor Ed Balls, identified poor urban transport as one of four key barriers to better productivity. The state of urban infrastructure outside the capital “stands out in international context”, they wrote, and not in a good way. “Spending data suggests more can be done,” they added.

So it is against this backdrop that the government is talking about creating its new Canary Wharfs. The £80mn — spread over five years — that comes with the new zones has to be split between tax incentives and other investment such as infrastructure. That isn’t going to build Leeds a Jubilee line.

A picture paints a thousand words though, so when geographer Alasdair Rae posted a map this month showing what London’s new Elizabeth line would look like if you picked it up and plonked it in the north of England, it unsurprisingly went viral.

It’s not that northern England necessarily begrudges London its rail links. It’s that the growth argument for also investing properly in transport outside the capital feels so obvious. So obvious, indeed, that even the chancellor’s own rhetoric agrees.

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