‘Act of a conman’: Leeds commuters rue PM’s broken promises on HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail

It’s 10.40am on Thursday morning, and at Leeds railway station, six of the next seven arriving trains are delayed.

Departures are marginally better. Only two from the next 10 of those – just 20 per cent – are set to be late.

“The same every bloody time I come here,” mutters Pete McGurk, a retired bank manager waiting to travel to Nottingham. “No one expects them to be on time any more.”

It was almost exactly as he spoke that, 200 miles away in parliament, Grant Shapps was hammering yet another nail into the coffin of the north’s creaking infrastructure: after months of speculation, the transport secretary confirmed that plans to build an HS2 line into the West Yorkshire city had been scrapped.

The government’s integrated rail plan (IRP) reneged on three years’ worth of Boris Johnson’s promises by spiking both the high-speed London connection and the proposed Northern Powerhouse Rail, a new east-west link that would have connected Leeds and Manchester via Bradford.

At a stroke, more than a decade’s worth of planning in Leeds – including vast amounts of preparatory work for a new HS2 station – was effectively rendered redundant. For some, it raised one obvious question: whatever happened to levelling up?

Yet, while the reaction of northern politicians and businesses was one of instant fury (the mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, called Mr Johnson a “liar”), the views of those waiting on the station concourse are rather more mixed.

HS2 has never been universally popular here. Its development – which has included the compulsory purchase of homes along its proposed route – was seen by many as a vast white elephant. While advocates argued that the scheme would benefit local transport links by increasing network capacity, others have maintained – reasonably perhaps – that there must be an easier, more cost-effective way of improving connections between, say, Goldthorpe and Leeds than building a new £100bn line to the capital.

“Getting to London a bit faster might be good for a few business people but, for the average person, they just want better local services,” says Annette Hopton, a retired operations manager from North Yorkshire. “They want reliable buses, trains that turn up on time, old lines reopened and clean trains. They should have spent the last 10 years concentrating on that instead of wasting all that money on this.”

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As it happens, this is more or less what the IRP promises to do: spend £96bn on speeding up travel times between northern cities, creating an integrated ticketing system, electrifying lines, and building a new tram system centred on Leeds. Does she like the sound of it?

“I like the sound of it, but [Boris Johnson] says he’ll do a lot of things and then never does,” the 68-year-old replies. “I don’t want to get political, but what happened to his oven-ready Brexit?”

This may be something of a key point.

While there seems to be a reasonably even split between those who are in favour of HS2 and those who are not, almost everyone The Independent spoke to today appeared to characterise its cancellation at this late stage as a broken promise; as one more bit of evidence that this Conservative government – that Westminster itself – does not care for the north, beyond its votes.

Take the aforementioned Mr McGurk, now tucking into a McDonald’s while he waits for his train.

“Honest truth, I felt HS2 was probably overpriced and there was the potential for it to drain talent to London,” the 59-year-old says. “But [Boris Johnson] promised it. He promised it over and over again to get elected, and now to just pull it – without any thought for people here, without any shame of feeling for the problems it will cause – it’s the act of a shyster. It’s the behaviour of a conman.”

He perhaps won’t be voting for Mr Johnson next time round, then? A splutter of coffee. “How anyone voted for him in the first place, I have no idea.”

The real anger, perhaps, comes when people are asked about the cancellation of Northern Powerhouse Rail.

While the building (or not) of HS2 has always dominated headlines, it has long been this east-west link that has been seen by many here as crucial to both the north’s economic regeneration and the convenience of hundreds of thousands of commuters. Axing it has left the region with “second-class” infrastructure, according to the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.

“I saw this coming a mile off but it’s still a shocker,” says Vijay Patel, arriving in Leeds today from Bradford.

The 40-year-old lives in the Wool City and regularly travels for his work as an IT specialist. “I always try and take the train,” he says. “I can get work done and it’s better for the environment. But in Bradford, the links are so bad, it almost forces you to get into your car. It’s like we’re getting no help to do the right thing.”

While the IRP promises that the electrification of existing routes will knock a few minutes off journey times between Bradford or Leeds and Manchester, early analysis suggests that Bradford will remain Britain’s worst-connected major city.

The scrapping of Northern Powerhouse Rail has left Mr Patel wondering about his home city’s entire future. “If you don’t have decent transport links, people leave,” the father of two says. “That’s what’s happening. Bradford is being allowed to decline.”

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Harry Edwards would like to see this line, too. The 22-year-old politics student is originally from Cumbria but now lives in Leeds.

“I was never won over by HS2,” he says. “But it’s a scandal how long it takes to get around the north. It’s holding us back. If you want to level up, you have to make it easier for us to get from place to place.”