Manchester will be 'best place to live in the country’ once HS2 is built - but only if it's done properly, Mayor says

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Manchester could be ‘the best place to live in the country’ once HS2 has been completed — so long as it’s done in the right way, the Mayor has said.

Currently, leaders in Manchester — and across the North — are locked in a disagreement with the government over how it is best for the high-speed railway to connect the second city with the rest of the country. The latest row has come about after Ministers said they could not afford to build the promised underground Piccadilly HS2 station, which would instead be replaced by an overground terminus, with trains being brought in on unsightly concrete stilts .

That’s the wrong approach Andy Burnham told reporters, as he called on MPs to debate the issue in the House of Parliament. The Labour man also confirmed that authorities in the North are happy to explore the prospect of land value capture — an ‘innovative finance’ method, he said.

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Outlining the issues from the roof of Mayfield Depot, which sits next to Manchester Piccadilly station, Mr Burnham said: “They get bigger the closer to Manchester city centre you get. The government is proposing a cut-price scheme that brings HS2 in on stilts into Manchester city centre into Piccadilly and would take it out towards Yorkshire as Northern Powerhouse Rail in a similar construct of concrete flyover.

“We think it's unfair to the existing communities in East Manchester, but we also think it's wrong from a railway point of view. You know the issue we have here is congestion on the surface of the railway in Manchester city centre and what are we going to do? Add more trains into that mix?

“What we should do,