Who is new transport secretary Louise Haigh and what has she said about railways and roads?
05 JUL, 2024 BY
ROB HAKIMIAN
Louise Haigh has been elected as Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley for a fourth time and has been named as transport secretary in new prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet.
We look at Haigh’s history as a politician and particularly where it pertains to transport.
Directly before being elected as MP for Sheffield Heeley in the 2015 General Election, Haigh worked for three years as public policy manager for multinational insurance company Aviva. In this role she was responsible for corporate governance and responsible investment policy.
After being elected, Haigh’s maiden speech in the House was about the reform of financial services. “If we are to secure a sustainable economy that delivers benefits for all, we must transform the way our economy works, incentivising investment in green, productive industries and penalising those short-term industries and practices that have done our economy and society such harm,” she said.
Nine months after the 2015 General Election, a study of the 177 new MPs that had joined found that Haigh was the most active. She had made 90 speeches and asked 471 parliamentary question in this period.
Within six months of her first election, Haigh became a shadow Cabinet Office minister. Over the next four years she moved to shadow minister in Culture, Media and Sport then shadow minister in the Home Office.
Her first shadow cabinet role was as shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, which she took up in April 2020. She held this position until being named shadow secretary of state for transport when Starmer shuffled his shadow cabinet in November 2021. She remained shadow transport secretary up until the calling of the General Election in May 2024.
Official portrait of Louise Haigh
Transport focus
While transport was not seemingly high on her agenda – at least publicly – prior to 2021, Haigh was incensed by the November 2021 release of the Tory government’s
Integrated Rail Plan.
This document confirmed that the eastern arm of High Speed 2 (HS2), from Birmingham to Leeds (via Sheffield), would not go ahead. Additionally, Northern Powerhouse Rail – which had long been promised as a new high-speed to connect the cities of the North from Liverpool to Hull – would only go between Manchester and Leeds, mostly on existing infrastructure.
Eleven days before she would be named shadow transport secretary, Haigh made her views on the
Integrated Rail Plan clear.
“This report was more than 12 months overdue, and it definitely was not worth the wait,” she said in a statement. “The prime minister has once again shown people across the North of England that they do not matter to him or his government.
“Growth and jobs are being held back here because we are not well connected with other cities. It is utterly ridiculous that the fourth largest city in the UK does not have a direct connection to an airport.
“The prime minister is forcing us to continue rely on creaking Victorian infrastructure.”
On social media and in a Sky News interview she reinforced the point that Northern Powerhouse Rail had been promised “over 60 times in three different manifestos”.
Six months after becoming shadow transport secretary, Haigh spoke at the ASLEF Union Invest In Rail conference and said: “As a proud trade unionist, it’s an honour to work with this fantastic union on building a world class rail network that passengers, workers and the public deserve.”
She came out in support of unions as the government announced 10% budget cuts for the sector. “[It] will lead to one thing, and one thing only, managed decline,” she said in a video posted to her social media on 16 May 2022.
She continued: “As shadow secretary of state for transport, I see investment in rail and public transport as the engine of the transformation we need to see. Not just because of every £1 invested in rail contributes £8.50 to the economy, not just because rail accounts for 10% of all passenger journeys but just 1% of carbon emissions, but because rail and public transport connects the talented young students to their chosen college, widens job opportunities for local people and drives the economic opportunities that we need to see in order to connect our regions and nations and drive investment into the areas of the country that have been neglected for too long.
“That’s why I want to see a rolling programme of electrification, Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2 delivered in full. It’s essential to turn the tide on our incredibly unequal country, it’s essential to help tackle the climate crisis and it would be a huge vote of confidence in our regions and nations.”
During the rail strikes that plagued the country during the last couple of years, Haigh continually criticised the transport secretary. “Grant Shapps refuses to even meet with regional leaders to discuss a plan to restore services. What does the transport secretary actually do all day?” she asked in August 2022.
At the Labour Party Conference in September 2022, Haigh first revealed Labour’s plans to renationalise the country’s railways.
“[Labour in government] will put the public back in control of the essential public transport they depend upon,” she said. “The Labour government we will form will end the farce on our railways. We will end the failed experiments, we will cast aside the tired dogma that has failed passengers. We will improve services and lower fares and yes Labour in power will bring our railways back into public ownership, where they belong.”
In February 2023, at an appearance at the Northern Transport Summit, Haigh outlined how a labour government would “back the North and build infrastructure fit for the century ahead”. This included delivering Northern Powerhouse rail and HS2 in full.
In September 2023, when rumours of Sunak’s plan to cancel HS2 to from Birmingham to Manchester were swirling, Haigh made a furious speech in Parliament.
“What started out as a modern infrastructure plan left by the last Labour government linking our largest northern cities, after 13 years of Tory incompetence, waste and broken promises will have turned into a humiliating Conservative failure. A great rail betrayal,” she said. “£45bn and the least possible economic impact from the original plan. £45bn and the North left with nothing. But frankly […] what would we expect from a prime minister that doesn’t travel through the north of England on rail? He only ever flies over it.”
A couple of weeks later, once the cancellation of HS2 had been confirmed and the compensatory Network North document had been released, Haigh described it as “an absolute farce”.
Where Labour leader Starmer said that it was “not possible” for it to resurrect HS2 if it came into power because the government had “blown the budget”, Whitehall sources briefed
The Telegraph in March 2024 that Haigh was hoping to reinstate Phase 2a between Birmingham and Crewe.
In December 2023 when Labour convened its rail review board, headed up by former Siemens chief Jürgen Maier, Haigh stated: “Labour are serious about delivering transport infrastructure fit for the century ahead. That’s why I’m delighted Jürgen Maier will lead an expert review on delivering infrastructure better, faster and cost effectively.”
Where Haigh’s focus had been on rail, when it came to the election campaign, she started promoting roads to combat the Tories’ attack line that Labour was waging a war on drivers.
She was the face of Labour’s Plan for the Automotive Sector, which featured actions for “tackling our crumbling local roads” and the deferral of the £320M A27 Arundel Bypass scheme which is said to provide enough money to repair up to 1M potholes annually.
“We will provide local authorities with multi-year funding settlements so that they have that budget over a longer period and they can prevent potholes from occurring in the first place,” she said in an interview about the plan for drivers. “I know how frustrating it is for people when they see their local council coming round, patching up and repairing a pothole and then they have to come round in two or three months and do it again. It’s really poor value for money and it doesn’t increase the life expectancy of the road.”
Two weeks before the General Election, Haigh told
Metro: “Sheffield and Manchester are the two largest neighbouring cities in Europe that don’t have a motorway between them.
“Sheffield is the largest city in Europe that doesn’t have a direct rail link to an airport and the North as a whole is losing £16bn a year in lost growth, thanks to the poor connectivity, the delays and overcrowding that we’re experiencing all the time on the railways.”
She said that her Department for Transport would publish a long-term strategy to combat this, aligned with central government’s 10-year infrastructure plan.
“We are not committing to a specific infrastructure plan because we don’t yet know the state of the finances or the state of the delivery of much of the infrastructure that the Tories have promised,” she added.
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