Manchester City Council is committing £1 million to make the ‘urgent’ case for a new underground station at Manchester Piccadilly. A report discussed by town hall bosses on Wednesday, June 10, called for ‘certainty’ over the plans for a subterranean station to help ease train queues at one of the busiest stations in the North.
The document revealed that a loose consensus already exists between the Mayor of Greater Manchester and His Majesty’s Government, agreeing the underground platform ‘could be a catalyst and enabler for major regeneration and economic growth for Greater Manchester and the wider North’. But now town hall boss Bev Craig says the council is determined to prove the case, with £1 million set aside from business rates growth reserves to employ more staff to carry out financial modelling and tests.
Council leader’s vision
Addressing her executive team slightly tongue-in-cheek, council leader Bev Craig said: “You just have to go across Europe and the world to see – it’s not beyond the realms of man to put a train station underground. Even if you go to London, it’s entirely common and reasonable to expect to travel underground. Previous governments have made… What we’ve tried to create from the ashes of HS2 is a reworked Northern Powerhouse Rail, that for the first time in its history has actually committed some proper money to get stuff done.”
The decision comes less than a month after the King’s speech revealed the government would be committing up to £45 billion to Northern Powerhouse Rail, a major overhaul of rail infrastructure in the north. This includes plans for a new rail line between Liverpool and Manchester. At the time, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham hinted there was an ‘openness’ at Whitehall to an underground station which could transform Piccadilly into ‘the King’s Cross of the North’.
HS2 alternatives
The previous HS2 proposals from the government to solve congestion at Piccadilly included what Coun Craig described as ‘big, big stilts across the city centre, ripping up communities in Ardwick and surrounding areas’. Now the Manchester boss claims the town hall has the government’s ear on the Northern Powerhouse Rail project, with plans to ‘sit down and discuss how to increase growth and improve transport in the North West’.
“Our pitch to successive governments has been really quite straight-forward,” Coun Craig said. “There have been levels of economic growth in this city region that have not been seen anywhere else in the UK. But we know there’ll come a point when our trains and transport infrastructure will hold us back. Anyone who has been stuck in the queue of trains trying to get through platform 14 may as well be sat in the queue of cars driving on the road beneath you. That’s no way to run a modern transport system.”
She added: “The reality is that sometimes you’ve got to make the decision to do harder things for the long-term to make things better in 2050, and this is a classic example where Manchester is asking for that.”
Next steps
The report approved by the cabinet will see more members of staff hired as part of the City Centre Growth and Infrastructure team. Transport for Greater Manchester will commission several pieces of analysis, which will be put together in a ‘Green Book evidential case’ to persuade the government the long-term benefits will outweigh the financial cost. Costs for an underground station during the HS2 projects were estimated to cost around £12.3 billion.
