Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the further work on reinstating the Colne-Skipton rail link as part of a new freight railway route between Liverpool and Yorkshire, to assess the freight demand and commercial viability of the scheme, will be undertaken by and on behalf of the Department for Transport or Transport for the North; if so (1) who is carrying out the work and whether such work has started; (2) what is the target date for its completion; and (3) what the relationship is of this work to that being carried out by Transport for the North on cross-Pennine communications in the central trans-Pennine corridor.

Further work to assess the freight demand and commercial viability of reinstating the Colne-Skipton link, a project championed by Andrew Stephenson MP, the Hon Member for Pendle, will be undertaken for the Department for Transport (DfT), who will work closely with Transport for the North (TfN). No decisions have been made yet on the scope and timescale of this work.

TfN’s work on the Central Pennines Strategic Development Corridor is providing a strategic programme case for multimodal investment in this corridor. It has informed TfN’s recently published Investment Programme, which includes reinstatement of the Skipton-Colne link as a scheme. The planned DfT-led work therefore takes forward further assessment of this element of TfN’s Investment Programme.