I am very concerned about levels of transport investment in the North and have spoken to the Transport Secretary and his ministers on this many times as well as raising the matter at Prime Minister’s Questions. To be fair to the Government, this has been a problem for many generations and with governments of all political make ups. Neither is it the North versus the rest of the country, the spending bias is almost totally towards London, at the expense of all other regions. The table below, derived from information that I have obtained and analysed from the House of Commons Library, illustrates this clearly. This is the 5-year, per capita sums allocated to capital projects across the UK. Yorkshire and Humber is 5th in the list of 12 regions. For every £100 invested in London, only £35.81 is invested in our region. I will continue in my efforts to increase infrastructure spending and to make sure we see that there is a better balance between the regions. The good news is that the Government has accepted the case for this rebalancing in its Industrial Strategy Green Paper from January 2017 https://beisgovuk.citizenspace.com/strategy/industrial-strategy/supporting_documents/buildingourindustrialstrategygreenpaper.pdf - page 113/114 states “….we will take account of the balance of spending per head between different regions when designing future rounds of infrastructure spending.”
Of course, we can't just wait for fundamental change so I am also focused on the immediate delivery of local and regional projects:
Transpennine
The investment in railway infrastructure through ‘Network Rail's Great North Rail Project’ will provide better connections between towns and cities in the North. It will enable hundreds more trains to run each day, with more seats and faster services. Projects underway as part of the Great North Rail Project include electrifying key routes across the north west, connecting Manchester's three stations with the new Ordsall chord and developing plans for upgrading the Transpennine route between Manchester and Leeds and York.
The current Northern and TransPennine Express franchises will help, with 500 brand-new modern carriages, room for 40,000 more passengers, 2,000 extra services a week and a host of improvements. This will provide the biggest transformation to rail journeys in the north of England in decades, with the operators overseeing a massive £1.2 billion investment. This will help to rebalance the economy, creating jobs, opportunity and growth, and providing significantly better journeys across the region.
The Department for Transport is also working closely with Transport for the North on Northern Powerhouse Rail, which aims to provide faster and more frequent rail services across the region. The Government has committed £60 million to developing the scheme and is working with Transport for the North on potential route options and their costs and benefits. This analysis is due to be completed by the end of 2017 and I will do everything I can to make sure this happens.
York to Scarborough Road and Rail
Rail: By 2019 significant improvements to the rail service between York and Scarborough will be fully in place, with 14 extra trains (13 on Sundays) each way between, making the service half hourly throughout most of the day. Rolling stock will be new or brought up to modern standards and will include free Wi-Fi, improved customer service including on train real time passenger information screens, increased seating (106 more per train) and passenger facilities and improvements to ticketing and use of smart technology and improvements to Malton station. From May 2018, there will be a new 6am departure from Scarborough designed to connection into the 7am departure from York for London King’s Cross, and later trains to/from Scarborough in the evening.
Road: I now fully expect to see the first stage of the A64 carriage (between Hopgrove and Barton Hill) to be dualled by 2023. This follows the Highways England announcement that a dual carriageway will be needed to alleviate traffic problems beyond the Hopgrove roundabout and that previously planned improvements focused solely on the roundabout would not solve the problem.
I have been campaigning heavily for this change and working with MPs Robert Goodwill and Julian Sturdy, the A64 Growth Partnership, which includes businesses along the route together with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Local Enterprise Partnership, local authorities, councillors and the York and North Yorkshire Chamber. I also met with the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, and other transport ministers to make the case for more funding on a number of occasions.
Highways England has revealed in its feasibility study that all the options under consideration will include a dual carriageway from York to Barton Hill. It will now conduct a more detailed examination into environmental issues, traffic data, side roads and cost before making a recommendation following a consultation period in 2018.
I believe that this section will be delivered by 2023 but we also need a sequential approach to include a further section of dual carriageway, from Crambeck to Malton, and then specific improvements east of Malton such as the Rillington by-pass.