How much of this is "Civil Servants leaving central London" and how much is "jobs that were done by TOCs"?
The reason I ask is that Shapps is a pretty savvy PR operator (a horrible politician, but a darn sight sharper than most), and the idea of floating the prospect of lots of highly paid jobs coming to a new constituency will firstly enthuse a lot of Tories at the Conference (the prospect that your local town could attract high calibre jobs like the ones promised to Darlington/ Wolverhampton etc will put a spring in the step of new MPs and party activists), and secondly will distract from the recent news that "levelling up" seems to have created a lot more civil service jobs *in* London - e.g.
https://www.ft.com/content/b6d1947d-d1bb-4c22-ab41-b603448bc625
The number of civil servants working in London rose significantly more than elsewhere in the past year despite Conservative ministers’ pledges to shift Whitehall jobs out of the capital as part of their “levelling up” agenda. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2019 signalled that he would move thousands of officials to the regions to spread wealth across the country and in October 2020 indicated that even ministers and their private offices might move to “the great cities of the North”. Meanwhile, in March 2020 chancellor Rishi Sunak announced plans to move 22,000 civil servants out of central London by 2030 to help ensure “government will make decisions different in future”. But official figures show the opposite is occurring. The civil service headcount in London grew 11 per cent from 91,660 to 101,930 in the year to March 2021, more than double the rate in the rest of the country.
So this could be one of those stories that comes to "nothing" but will be a good way of diverting attention away from the fact that the rhetoric of sharing the wealth around the country is actually just creating more jobs in central London?
Obviously the new railway will need to have a different set up, a number of jobs that were done by TOCs will presumably now be done "centrally", I just feel that this is more about short term opportunism than actual details about the new railway
I don't think that the Tories have decided what they want the new railway to actually be, they seem to be fudging their way through it, I think it's far too early for the kind of things being discussed on this thread - but I'd put my fiver on Darlington, given the way that the town combines "railway heritage" with "fast trains back to London" and "flavour of the month political climate given the huge investments being sanctioned in the Tees Valley - the kind of thing that would be Wasteful Public Spending if Labour were doing it, but it's fine when it's a Tory Mayor spaffing money around"!
They could do a lot worse
However, the Dept of Health is already at Leeds, which rather rules out West Yorks generally I fear.
York would please Sir Humphrey, perhaps
Channel 4's "HQ" is moving to Leeds (another quasi-public organisation), but I don't know if this means West Yorkshire would be more or less likely as the notional location of some railway jobs
