October 5th - Navigating the £36bn Transport Shift

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, I unpack the government's bold move to redirect £36bn from HS2 to other transport projects across the North and Midlands. From new rail lines to road upgrades, I explore what this means for UK travellers.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, on Thursday the 5th of October.
0:10.9	The day after, we found what £36 billion can do for transport.
0:20.1	This, of course, is the claim by the Prime Minister that he has
0:26.4	stopped HS2 from expanding north of Birmingham and that the money saved is going to be spent
0:35.5	instead on a whole range of transport projects, mostly to benefit the North and Midlands.
0:44.3	This is a curious story because that £36 billion was kind of looking far into the future.
0:52.5	And so, for example, the claim is that one of the most tangible
0:58.0	benefits, which is that from the end of this month, fares will remain on English buses at
1:04.7	£2, saving people 50 pence a pop, that is effectively something which will cost some tens of millions of pounds
1:14.9	to do, but ultimately it's difficult to see a connection between that and what has been
1:20.5	scrapped from HS2. It's a bit of current spending that will have very little relation to what was planned to be spent in 2040, for example.
1:33.6	But I have trawled through to find what the projects are that will be benefiting the whole country, according to the Prime Minister.
1:47.9	And I'll just take a quick spin through that.
1:51.3	The Northern Powerhouse Rail project looks as though it is kind of coming back,
1:59.4	although it's now called Network North.
2:02.4	The whole idea of Northern Powerhouse Rail, or HS3, as it was called, for a time,
2:09.7	is that you would have a high-speed line going from Liverpool to Manchester, to Bradford, to Leedseds and then he'd be sending trains onwards to
2:21.4	Hull and also to York and to Newcastle and the idea will be apparently that there is going to be
2:31.5	some very high speed stuff going on because there is going to be some very high speed stuff going on,
2:36.1	because there is going to be £12 billion promised for a line between Liverpool and Manchester.
2:44.1	Yes, one third of the money is being promised just on that 40 miles or so, which is quite surprising, but there we are.
2:54.6	There will also be a line from Manchester to a new station in Bradford, which will take 30 minutes.
	...

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