Peer review: Richard Threlfall
UK Head of Infrastructure, Building and Construction, KPMG
It is just after 1600 on Friday, and I am on a TransPennine Express train from Piccadilly to Leeds. To clarify for London and overseas readers, that’s Manchester Piccadilly, although it did feel a bit like Piccadilly Circus on the platform and there was a scrum to get on board the three carriages. No WiFi. Lack of phone reception periodically, cutting me off from the rest of the world. I am just thankful I wasn’t an hour later leaving Manchester, standing for an hour in conditions so overcrowded they probably contravene European Union regulations on the transport of livestock.
It is the overcrowding on this route and many others across the North, and the time it takes to travel between the major cities, that is the raison d’etre for Transport for the North. David Brown gets that. But I am not entirely sure Paul Clifton does. “Grand talk of a road tunnel, or a rail tunnel” suggests a certain scepticism that these are realistic solutions, but transformational improvements in transport connectivity must be at the heart of the Northern Powerhouse.
Let’s take this back to fundamentals. It is all about productivity… or lack of. The productivity of the north of England is 11% lower than the average for the whole country, which in turn is 26% lower than the productivity of the US. Our country clings on by its fingertips to first world status, but will lose that within my lifetime unless we find ways to raise our productivity. And we do that by better connecting together population centres and jobs.
In countries across the world, the only way to unlock that productivity gain is through the expansion of cities into mega-cities with a population of more than ten million. But an expanding catchment area is increasingly expensive to connect, as London is finding. The North, however, is different - it already has a 15 million population concentrated around a large number of substantial (but by global standards irrelevant) cities. Put in place super high-speed transport links and we create a multi-centre mega-city, to take on the world and benefit the whole of the UK in the process.
Follow this logic, and devolution (and Transport for the North) is about the regional, NOT the local. David is right when he says buses are an issue best dealt with at a local authority level. What has been missing is regional-level planning, prioritisation and investment. That is what Transport for the North is there to fix. Its creation is a huge step forward and its success would be the blueprint for other regional authorities in England.
We had this same regional vs local debate in establishing Business North, an organisation that is there to offer views on issues affecting businesses across the region. Transport connectivity is top of the list. Businesses want to tap into a wider labour market, reach suppliers and customers more quickly, and have faster and more reliable freight corridors to national and international markets. None of that will happen by incremental improvements to existing routes where track was laid more than 100 years ago, winding romantically around the region’s beautiful geography. It will happen with new roads and rail routes in tunnels - expensive but transformative.
