Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the letter from the Minister of State for Transport to the Chair of the Transport Select Committee, dated 30 December 2022, whether the analysis being undertaken for specific phases of the HS2 programme will (a) include the Transport for the North preferred option, (b) cover the wider economic benefits of each option and (c) assess benefit-cost ratios using the (i) updated PLANET Framework Model v10.1 and (ii) NoRMS 2 model.

The Government’s strategy for Northern Powerhouse Rail remains the one described in the Integrated Rail Plan.

The NPR Strategic Outline Business Case (SOBC) will include a full economic assessment of different NPR network configurations, including the TfN preferred network as set out in statutory advice. The economic analysis will incorporate both transport and wider economic impacts alongside other economic, social and environmental impacts as set out in DfT’s Transport Analysis Guidance.

The transport impacts are being assessed using the latest version of TfN’s Northern Rail Modelling System (NoRMS). The Planet Framework Model (PfM) is used to assess impacts of HS2 and is not used to estimate transport impacts in the NPR business case, although outputs from PfM are taken as inputs to NoRMS.