International investors attracted to towns and cities on HS2 route

Julian Jackson, Assistant Director of Planning, Highways & Transport at Bradford Council told delegates that the authority is making case for a Northern Powerhouse rail station in the city.

He said that ensuring the city, which currently lacks a main line rail station, is on the new fast route would cut journey times between Bradford and Leeds to seven minutes and 20 in the opposite direction to Manchester.

This improved rail service would cut the volume of car travel on the route between Bradford and Leeds, which has the largest commuter flows between any two cities in the UK. A total of 45,000 people travel daily between the two cities, 70% of whom go by car.

Work is going on to identify inclusive growth corridors across the Leeds city-region, he said: “We want to make sure that HS2 station is the hub for that wider connectivity. All of our strategies are investing in the maximum economic potential of our cities. It’s going to be really important to make business more competitive and for people to access opportunities across the UK.”

Like Birmingham, Chesterfield is already benefiting from the prospective arrival of HS2, the local council’s leader said: “We’ve been able to attract international investment because we are on the route.”

Cllr Tricia Gilby, Leader of Chesterfield Borough Council, told the session that the town was on the final shortlist of towns to host Talgo’s first factory in the UK.

Since the conference, the Spanish rail manufacturer has announced that it is siting a research facility in Chesterfield.

She said that improvements to Chesterfield’s infrastructure, including its railway station, would make firms more willing to locate in the town. Under the most recent plans for HS2, two services per hour will stop in the town, which is the resting place of train inventor George Stephenson and the location of the only surviving operating roundhouse in the UK.

 

Paul Griffiths, Phase 2 Managing Director at HS2, said that Doncaster was just one area which would benefit from the upgrades being planned to the east coast main line: “Creating capacity on the existing rail network allows other things to happen.”

Cllr Bob Sleigh, Deputy Mayor of the West Midlands Combined Authority told the session that work would behind on the new HS2 Interchange station at Solihull by this time next year.

The stations, along with the Birmingham Curzon HS2 station, will be a catalyst for growth both within Birmingham and the wider regions. One of those regions is the Black County which Sleigh said was already seeing a huge increase in investment, where the combined authority has been investing in the remediation of contaminated land to enable housing development.

HS2 also provides a ‘real opportunity’ to relieve congestion on the west coast main line, he said: “The ambition is to unlock some of that capacity which is nose to tail at the moment. We need to be able to get our goods to market and the challenge with current networks is that whole system needs to increase capacity to deliver good to market.”

 

PBA, now part of Stantec; Our perspective of Integrated Stations along the HS2 route:

For the locations that don’t feature a shiny new HS2 station, but can be served by “classic” rail compatible services to make onward connections, the story may be necessarily different to the main HS2 station locations.  Whereas they have to understand and manage the interaction between people accessing the station from a wider sub-region, as well as maximising growth potential around the station, the integrated stations have more certainty about the environment they will be operating in.  It seems to us that, in many ways, the stakeholders in these locations will have more control of their own destiny, as they won’t have major infrastructure works to contend with.

We think that the key to their success will therefore revolve around flexibility – to what extent can they maintain an approach that will allow them to react to opportunities as and when they arise.  There is already some evidence to suggest that the effects of High Speed rail may be unexpected or unanticipated – in East Kent, for example, there seems to have been an explosion of smaller scale economic activity – micro-businesses of professionals who can take advantage of the “off-peak” HS service to get to their London clients quickly and cost effectively.

Encouraging the growth of these, and being fleet-of-foot enough to recognise what is happening and support it may be key for these locations.  It is good to see that places like Chesterfield are already reporting some inward investment based on the potential of HS2.  We think that these towns are going to need to continue to build their profile, get themselves on the map and be highly creative in the way that they develop policy frameworks to be able to accommodate emerging businesses.