Northern Powerhouse Rail

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My noble friend is right: the Government are retaining that part of the land between the West Midlands and Crewe that they have bought for precisely that purpose, because they know that at some stage a railway will have to be built. It will probably not be a high-speed railway. It is certainly not a railway to the specification of High Speed 2 phase 1, which has cost an extraordinary amount of money because of its specification. It might be that only part of that route is needed sooner than the more northern parts.

It is clear that the west coast main line is full of trains. There is no space left. The Office of Rail and Road declined all the open access applications last summer, simply because there was no timetable space on the railway to accommodation them. It is right for the Government to think about the future and to plan to deliver this new railway at a time when it is needed.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I worked at No. 10 as Tony Blair’s strategy adviser in 2005 when an in principle go-ahead was given to an ambitious high-speed rail network for the whole country. Twenty-odd years later, we do not even have one small part of that plan in place. In the same period, since 2008 China has built 48,000 kilometres of high-speed rail.

I am a Liverpool supporter, so I regularly go—

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

You have lost us there.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

It has been a difficult weekend. I regularly visit the north-west of England, as I did at the weekend. I am involved in an east of Pennines business, so I am very familiar with the 19th-century infrastructure of the whole of the north of England. Are we remotely ambitious enough with our rail infrastructure?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The simple answer is yes. What the north of England needs is better, more reliable connectivity, most importantly at a frequency at which a timetable is not needed. This is the intention of this Government’s whole plan. It can be delivered as a consequence of finishing the trans-Pennine route upgrade and carrying out, in sequence, the plans set out by the Secretary of State last week.