After 12 years in the planning, the north’s flagship rail scheme still has no detailed design and a £45 billion budget that the public accounts committee says was set before anyone knew what it would build.
The plan to transform train services across the north of England is at risk of sliding into the same fiasco that has engulfed HS2, according to parliament’s spending watchdog, which says the scheme still lacks a proper design and a realistic budget after more than a decade of planning.
In a withering report, the Commons public accounts committee (PAC) said Northern Powerhouse Rail had no detailed design to speak of after 12 years on the drawing board, and warned that its £45 billion budget had become “decoupled from reality”. As it stands, the committee said, the project is likely to fail to deliver the improvements promised and risks becoming yet another government infrastructure albatross.
Originally conceived as a high-speed line linking Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, the scheme has since been pared back to a series of local upgrades intended to deliver faster and more frequent services. The government revived the programme in January with a phased £45 billion vision for the north, but the PAC is unconvinced the numbers stack up.
The committee said it was “not confident that the Department for Transport (DfT) has learnt all the lessons from its past failures in its management of other rail projects”, pointing above all to the truncated HS2 north-south link. HS2 has busted its budget and could cost well in excess of £100 billion despite now running only as far as Birmingham, and is expected to be at least five years late.
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