Despite my rant about ‘levelling up’ being about more than trains, which it should be, I do have a couple of thoughts re Northern Rail. 1. One of the first things that’s likely to now happen is that services through Manchester will be cut: manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-m…
Andy Burnham talks about this in some detail in this interview with us yesterday: manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-m…
2. This means that the services we were promised back when the Northern franchise was originally let in the run-up to 2016 are likely to be pared back. So this is a broken government promise.
3. No detail has been released on what the infrastructure plans for central Manchester will be, even though we were promised v specific ones back in 2014/15: manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-m…
4. So the onus is now on government to deliver those upgrades. It’s no good pretending the Northern nationalisation is a magic wand. It isn’t. We’re now likely to get more reliable, but fewer services - yes. But basically, we’re back to 2015.
I don’t know how you best describe that. It’s not levelling up. It’s kind of levelling back.
5. As @stephenkb has also noted, this failure with Northern is essentially the government’s failure. It’s good that something has been done, but at the heart of this lies a set of things promised by George Osborne that were either partly done, or badly done.
Much will now be expected from the budget.
And this concludes my train thoughts.
And this concludes my train thoughts.
