Heidi Alexander

This has been a good debate and I am very grateful to all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed. As I said in my introductory remarks, I believe that these motions represent an important step forward in delivering Northern Powerhouse Rail. As my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) said, these plans will deliver faster, more frequent rail connections between fast-growing city regions in the north, which will enable more jobs, new homes and a greater number of opportunities for businesses to invest and expand. I would like to pick up on some of the remarks that have been made tonight. I welcome the recognition by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew), that this is a practical mechanism for taking forward work on Northern Powerhouse Rail in the north-west of England. I have to say, however, that I fundamentally disagree with his characterisation of this Government’s commitment to Northern Powerhouse Rail. I would say gently to him that it is a bit rich for someone from a party that first talked about Northern Powerhouse Rail in 2014 to criticise this Government for investing more than £1 billion in this spending review, which is significantly more than the hon. Gentleman’s Government ever did in the years since 2014. It was his party that was guilty of dither and delay when it came to improving rail infrastructure in the north of England. The shadow Minister claims that the Government are going to be spending significant money on consultants, but the money we allocated in the spending review is to acquire land and do preparatory works on the Yorkshire schemes—those three corridors improving links into Leeds from Bradford, York and Sheffield—as well as to plan properly. To pick up the point made by the Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), we will not be making the same mistakes as the previous Government—we will not be letting contracts when we have not defined the scope of works. If the shadow Minister wants to understand why billions of pounds-worth of taxpayers’ money has been wasted on HS2, he needs to ask some of his colleagues some serious questions as to why his Government gave the go-ahead to HS2 when they did not know what they were asking the contractors to build.