Under pressure to address the lack of a northern leg and amid accusations of the HS2 project being “very poor value for money”, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that £4.7bn from the HS2 pot will be redirected into improving local transport connections in the North of England and the Midlands.

The Local Transport Fund will be used by local authorities in the North and Midlands to invest in transport projects that ‘will benefit more people, in more places, more quickly than HS2 ever would have done’.

The promise of HS2, first envisaged by the Gordon Brown government in 2009, was to connect the North of England to London with a new zero-carbon high-speed railway.

Fast forward 15 years and HS2 is nowhere near completion. Residents across Oxfordshire and Warwickshire have experienced huge disruption as swathes of land have been sliced up to lay tracks. Now it looks like it won’t come to fruition any time soon and the northern leg, connecting Birmingham to Manchester, won’t happen at...