A BRADFORD MP has said he is “sick and tired” of Yorkshire being short-changed, after a report showed the region has England’s lowest investment in transport.

Imran Hussain, Labour MP for Bradford East, said he had now written to Chancellor Philip Hammond seeking an urgent meeting with him about fairer funding for Yorkshire, ahead of next month’s Budget.

It follows a study published yesterday by the think-tank IPPR North that found current and committed transport projects amounted to just £190 per person in Yorkshire - a tenth of the amount spent on each Londoner and also lower than investment in both the north-east and north-west.

Mr Hussain said: “This report demonstrates the rank hypocrisy of the Government who promise great things for the North with one hand, but take funding away and pass it to London with the other, and quite frankly, I am sick and tired of London yet again benefitting whilst Bradford and Yorkshire are cheated.”

Other MPs were equally as critical, with Labour’s Bradford West MP Naz Shah saying: “Sadly, for all the Government rhetoric around the Northern Powerhouse, this demonstrates that the larger projects and investment the region needs are still being completely overlooked.”

Labour’s Bradford South MP, Judith Cummins, said it underlined the case for the Northern Powerhouse Rail line, known as HS3, to come to Bradford.

She said: “Without fair funding, Bradford’s economy will struggle to create the high skilled, fairly paid jobs we so desperately need.”

Bradford Telegraph and Argus:

Bradford Council’s transport chief, Councillor Alex Ross-Shaw, echoed her comments, saying: “This report makes the same argument we’ve been making when proposing a Bradford stop on the Northern Powerhouse Rail line.

“Yorkshire had received less funding even when compared to some other parts of the North and it desperately needs to be corrected if the Northern powerhouse project is to succeed.”

But a spokesman for the Department for Transport insisted the north was not being overlooked, saying: “We are investing £13 billion to improve transport across the north to improve journeys for local people, help industry grow and boost productivity.”

She added that Transport for the North (TfN), a body set up to transform links across the North of England, was developing a new transport strategy to benefit the whole of the North.

A spokesman for TfN welcomed the study, saying its under-development plan would outline priorities for the North such as high-speed rail.

She said: “We believe that by working together with our partners across the region we can make a stronger case for the North to get its fair share of transport investment, connecting the whole of the North so that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”

The Conservative MPs for Shipley and Keighley, Philip Davies and Kris Hopkins, could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, a separate study published today by traffic analysts TomTom showed that Leeds-Bradford was the 18th most congested area in the UK, with traffic pushing up journey times by an average of 26 per cent.

It found that the UK was the second most congested country in the world, after China.

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