Burnham wants growth in every postcode. His Railways Bill could kill it in mine, writes Mayor Ben Houchen

He has opened No 10 North in Manchester, and he talks of remaking our economic model to reindustrialise Britain and bring good jobs back to the regions.

This is a refreshing argument to hear from a Prime Minister. Some of us have been banging this drum for years; indeed since 2017 I have been putting it into practice across the Tees Valley. But the way to do this is action, not words.

So compare the words with the action. Ministers spend their days telling pension funds and international businesses that Britain is open for their capital.

But growth in every postcode does not come from Whitehall. It arrives when a company decides to risk its shareholders' money building something real in Billingham or Redcar, rather than in Texas or Rotterdam. The bargain underneath that invitation is a simple one: an investor who commits money here under a lawful contract is entitled to assume the British state will honour it.

Which brings me to the action as seen in the Railways Bill, and a clause few outside the industry have noticed. Clause 71 looks innocuous, but in practice it would hand Ministers sweeping, uncapped powers to reach into existing commercial rail agreements as the industry is folded into Great British Railways.

Why this matters is clearest from where I sit. Open-access operators, the private companies that compete with the state to give passengers more choice, have transformed parts of our network by doing precisely what the Prime Minister asks of business. Grand Central links Eaglescliffe and Hartlepool straight to London; Lumo has brought real competition and investment to the East Coast Main Line, transforming lives through well-paid, skilled jobs.

Those operators are now preparing to spend hundreds of millions on new trains. Those orders would fill the order book at Hitachi's plant in Newton Aycliffe, protect some of the most skilled manufacturing jobs in the North East, and ripple through a supply chain far beyond the factory gate.

This is reindustrialisation exactly as Mr Burnham describes it, paid for by private companies backing British manufacturing and asking the taxpayer for nothing. It is also precisely the kind of investment that evaporates the moment the people writing the cheques lose faith in the contracts underneath it. Nobody signs off hundreds of millions of pounds of rolling stock on a handshake. Create enough uncertainty and the money quietly goes elsewhere, and the pain lands nowhere near a railway balance sheet in London. It lands on the factory floor in County Durham and in the towns counting on the work; these are the very postcodes the Prime Minister says he is fighting for.

Capital is mobile and ruthless about where it settles. Any investor weighing up Britain is comparing us against America, Europe, the Gulf and Asia, pricing our reliability alongside our taxes, energy costs and planning. Earn a reputation for reaching into private agreements whenever it suits and there will be no press conference, just a quiet mark-up in the return an investment committee demands.

No single decision will make the headlines, but enough of them leave the whole country poorer, and the North poorest of all.

None of this means the Government can never act. Contracts sit under Parliament, not above it, but the bar for the state reaching back into a lawful commercial agreement should be extraordinarily high. Where such powers are unavoidable, they should be drawn tightly, used briefly, and placed under proper parliamentary scrutiny.

That is the test the Railways Bill must pass. Give Ministers what they need to stand up Great British Railways and carry existing contracts across, and no more. Put hard limits around the powers and shorten the window in which they can be used. Parliament must be given a real say before any Minister reaches into a private agreement; none of that would slow rail reform by a day. But it would give it a foundation worth building on.

The Prime Minister says he wants Britain to believe again. Don’t we all, but the people who need to believe in Britain first are the ones deciding whether their next factory goes to areas like mine or overseas, and they do not read manifestos. They read contracts and every pound of the reindustrialisation Mr Burnham promises rests on agreements like these holding firm. If he means it about good growth in every postcode, the most useful thing his Ministers can do is take their hands off the deals that will actually deliver it.

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Ben Houchen is the Metro Mayor of the Tees Valley.

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