Guest Writer Isabel Hodson argues that Leeds’ long-promised tram network won’t be delivered through quiet acquiescence or Northern grievance politics – and that Tracy Brabin must cut through Whitehall bureaucracy to keep West Yorkshire’s mass transit plans alive.
Defending Leeds’ mass transit dreams without resorting to rhetorical muck-flinging is essential if West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin wants ‘spades in the ground’ for a tram network during her lifetime.
Leeds is the largest city in western Europe to lack a mass transit system. This is a well-known fact, and probably the most oft-repeated sentence in Yorkshire (after ‘my football team has been relegated’).
As of last month, it seems likely that this will remain the case for some time. West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin has revealed that a plan to re-introduce a tram network to the region has been delayed to the ‘late 2030s’ at the behest of the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) – an arm’s-length government body which appears to have misread its job description.
The Authority has taken offence at the ‘dual track’ method employed by Brabin to speed up infrastructure development in the region. This would have seen both the planning operation and the assembling of the ‘business case’ justifying it running simultaneously, shaving several years off the project’s deadline. NISTA has demanded a return to the normative ‘sequential approach,’ in which this ‘business case’ is put to the government before any planning can begin.
As if the case has not been made continuously since Parliament granted the power to produce a ‘Supertram’ in Leeds in 1993. As if the economic logic of a mass transit system in a city of Leeds’ size is still somehow unproven. As if money is not already flowing into projects on the tram’s intended route (and indeed rely on its existence), like the expansion of Premier League stadium Elland Road. This is hardly a method which has seen the rapid delivery of infrastructure projects up and down the country, and Keir Starmer’s ailing government would do well to take notes on Brabin’s noble attempt to be radical.
Mayor Brabin, then, is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, she ought to be far more outspoken in defending the tram project and cutting through the bureaucratic fog surrounding NISTA’s enforced delay. It is also essential that the project ends up on the government’s ‘Major Projects Portfolio,’ and to do so requires an unrelenting advocate in West Yorkshire Combined Authority.
In response to NISTA’s report, Brabin said: ‘We wanted to try something new. That’s not the way it’s going to be. That’s fine.’ When voters go to the polls in May, this sort of flat acquiescence to bureaucratic dithering is not going to cut it.
Yet there is an equal and opposite trap. The months since Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham unofficially launched his leadership challenge in the New Statesman have demonstrated that neither the public nor central government has much patience for mayoral psychodrama.
Burnham’s favoured rhetoric, framing infrastructure development as a ‘zero-sum’ contest between North and South, has diminishing returns. The slightly ludicrous accusation that Heathrow’s third runway is being built at the direct expense of Manchester Airport’s expansion may be emotionally satisfying, but will only harden opposition to his plans within Westminster, and with only a rejection letter from the NEC to show for it.
Brabin should resist the temptation to turn Leeds’ tram into such a symbol of a risible and divisive culture war. Its delays have nothing to do with Heathrow Airport, or indeed the Elizabeth Line, the Docklands Light Railway, or even HS2. The problem lies in the fact that most mayors currently do not have the power to grant planning approval to tram, light rail, and underground projects, and so Brabin and her counterparts remain at the mercy of distant civil service bodies.
Thankfully, legislation currently progressing through Parliament is designed to fix this. Brabin must only hope that it does so before the demise of the government under which it began, and in the meantime, advocate for West Yorkshire’s future without indulging in the parochial rhetoric of ‘us vs them.’ It has not delivered trams to Leeds before – and is unlikely to do so now.
