MP COLUMN: 'Bradford needs Northern Powerhouse Rail'

Despite being one of the largest cities in the UK and a huge contributor to our region’s economy, Bradford is one of the few, if not the only major cities across the country, without access to a real mainline rail connection other than for a sporadic East Coast and Grand Central Line route that only sees a handful of trains arrive in and depart from the city every day, leaving us essentially cut off from the rest of the country.

As a result, travelling to Manchester or Leeds via public transport means a reliance on undependable commuter trains which cause endless misery for passengers and which have faced years of under-investment.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates this huge under-investment than the fact that waiting to get into Leeds Station can often take most of the journey, and the fact that the old Pacer trains, made up of a bus’s frame slapped on top of a train’s wheels were only finally withdrawn for good last year.

This underinvestment also means that travelling from Bradford to Leeds can take up to 30 minutes, despite just ten miles separating us, whilst the journey to Manchester is just as disproportionately long.

Some of these trips also require a change in Huddersfield or elsewhere and can take anywhere between 60 and 90 minutes, taking it off the table as a viable option for anyone wanting to commute and preventing us from capitalising on the connectivity that has seen cities like London thrive.

This need for connectivity, joining up Manchester, Bradford and Leeds on one, unbroken, high-speed line that slashes journey times and makes it possible to live in one city, work in another and spend time in the third would transform us from three separate cities into one unified economic belt, unlocking investment and encouraging growth on both sides of the Pennines.

That is why the West Yorkshire Mass Transit Plan is so important, and why Northern Powerhouse Rail with a city centre stop for Bradford is so crucial to our future and the region’s future.

Although some may claim that in the age of the internet, digital commuting and remote working, the relevance of rail links has diminished and travelling to the workplace is a thing of the past, they remain incredibly important to people’s lives and to business decisions on where to locate and where to invest.

Indeed, we have seen how important it is on two occasions where Bradford has been overlooked in the last month alone, with Darlington chosen to host the Treasury’s Northern Hub and Leeds chosen as the home of the Department for Transport’s own hub, and it is no coincidence that both cities are well served by the East Coast Mainline.

Despite our young, vibrant and technologically astute young population, highly respected Management School at the University of Bradford, low housing costs, ample business space and attractive offers to employers that should make us a powerhouse of industry, Bradford is being overlooked.

Several factors are behind this, but one is undoubtedly because we are not properly connected to other cities, offices and branches across the country, and if we took Bradford with all its vices and virtues and put it on a mainline within easy reach of London or Manchester, I have no doubt that our economy would be thriving today.

Instead, we remain stuck on the other side of Leeds, an afterthought in the decisions taken by the Government, by businesses and by investors, and our economy and the prospects of the people living here are being stifled as a result.

But it does not have to be this way, and the Mass Transit Plan and Northern Powerhouse Rail would help transform our future, allowing for Bradford, the fifth-largest metropolitan district in the UK to release our so-far untapped potential.

The West Yorkshire Mass Transit Plan would see Bradford and Leeds gain the metropolitan mass transit system that London, Manchester and other major cities in Europe and across the world take for granted, allowing us to hop on a bus or tram in Bradford and hop off again in Leeds, whilst a Northern Powerhouse Rail link would put us within 20 minutes of Manchester and seven minutes of Leeds, reducing previously unbearable journey times to something we wouldn’t give a second thought and giving people and businesses real reason to look again at Bradford.

Yet, whilst the future of the Mass Transit Plan led by local councils along with the West Yorkshire Combined Authority is secure, a decision on Northern Powerhouse Rail is far from certain, despite the overwhelming support of Transport for the North, local people and business.

Years after the idea was first proposed, the Government have still not made a decision, instead pushing ahead with projects for London like HS2, and the Department for Transport are now reportedly reviewing plans to include Bradford at all on the Northern Powerhouse Rail line.

From the very beginning, I have been clear that Northern Powerhouse Rail must be built in full, must be built soon and must be built with a city centre station in Bradford, and I will be doing all that I can to ensure that we get the connections that we need and deserve in Bradford, and to ensure that the Prime Minister sticks to the promise he made on levelling up the parts of the country that his Government left behind.