Pressed on what he would actually do with the keys to No 10, Burnham sets out a prospectus that is unmistakably in the Manchester mould.
He wants to bring back the northern leg of HS2. The scrapping of the Birmingham to Manchester route still rankles, and he is blunt that it should be revived.
“I am absolutely clear, I’ve seen it myself in terms of expansion of our travel system,” he says. “If you put that infrastructure in, it lays the foundations for higher growth… The lack of high-quality rail infrastructure in the north of England holds back its growth potential.”
What lifts this above a pipe dream, given the eye-watering sums involved – the Manchester leg was due to cost £36bn at the time it was cancelled – is how he says it should be paid for. It’s an idea he claims would spare the Treasury much of the bill and he has done it before, at scale.
“There’s a cleverer way of funding this,” he says. “If you go back, I put the funding package together for Crossrail and it was actually a package that did have contributions from business and residents.”
The trick missed last time, he argues, was capturing the soaring value of land around new stations, as London later did on the Northern line extension to Battersea. “You don’t take all the windfall off the landholder, but you share the proceeds of that windfall, and the increase in land values created by the infrastructure is captured to pay back the cost of the infrastructure. So why shouldn’t we fund infrastructure in this country in that way?”
It is, he insists, the future. “A much more devolved approach to running this country. You cannot get growth in a top-down, silo-driven model of government,” he says.
inews.co.uk
Quoting the relevant section (the rest of the article is a general interview of Burnham):
