This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will announce a third high-speed (HS3) rail link between Leeds and Manchester as a part of his plans to build an economic “Northern powerhouse”.
After the existing high speed link HS1 between London and the Channel Tunnel and the controversial £50bn HS2 from London to Birmingham which is scheduled to be completed by 2026, the freshly proposed east-west “HS3” would be a third high-speed railway for Britain. The second phase is planned to link Leeds and Manchester, and finally Scotland.
While expressing his willingness for serious devolution of powers and budgets for northern cities, the chancellor has said: “The cities of the north are individually strong, but collectively not strong enough. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.
“So the powerhouse of London dominates more and more. And that’s not healthy for our economy. It’s not good for our country.
“We need a Northern Powerhouse too. Not one city, but a collection of northern cities – sufficiently close to each other that combined they can take on the world.”
Mr Osborne will say while addressing in Manchester: “I want us to start thinking about whether to build a new high-speed rail connection east-west from Manchester to Leeds.
“We need to think big. We need an ambitious plan to make the cities and towns here in this northern belt radically more connected from east to west – to create the equivalent of travelling around a single global city. As well as fixing the roads, that means considering a new high speed rail link.
The objective should be to develop a “radical transport plan so that travelling between cities feels like travelling within one big city”.
However, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) has dismissed Mr Chancellor’s HS3 proposal, calling it a “costly vanity project” and indicating of it being “an expensive and inefficient way of linking the relatively short distances between northern cities”.
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