“Productive” talks have been held between mayors and the transport secretary over a possible revival of HS2, Andy Burnham has said.
The mayor of Greater Manchester told the Transport Select Committee he had met Mark Harper on Wednesday morning to discuss privately funded options to bring back the rail project – scrapped by Rishi Sunak in October.
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Last week, Mr Harper told a transport conference he would approach any meeting with “an open mind”, though he remained “somewhat sceptical” about whether HS2 could be completed without public investment.
But Mr Burnham backed the work he and his West Midlands counterpart, Andy Street, were carrying out, telling MPs: “If we do nothing, we will have a major transport headache.”
And he said more details of the plan could emerge in either February or March.
The prime minister made the axing of the northern leg of HS2 – set to run between Birmingham and Manchester – his key announcement at last year’s Conservative Party conference.
Mr Sunak said the “economic case” for the line had “massively weakened with the changes to business travel post-COVID”, and he promised to spend “every single penny” of the £36bn being saved on “hundreds of new transport projects in the North and the Midlands, and across the country”.
But he was met with fierce opposition from both Mr Burnham and Mr Street, with the former accusing the government of treating people in the north of England as “second-class citizens”.
Now the pair have commissioned a group of private sector…
