Midlands poised to receive £2.2bn of reallocated HS2 funding to improve transport

The Midlands is set to receive £2.2 billion of reallocated HS2 funding to improve local public transport, according to the UK government.

It's thanks to a new £4.7 billion local transport fund, which will be made available from April, 2025 to give local authorities time to prepare their plans and allow them to make improvements over seven years to 2032.

READ MORE: West Midlands and South West poised for billions of transport investment from HS2 savings

The funds come from redirected cash after the government announced the scrapping last autumn of the northern leg of the multibillion High Speed Rail 2 project, which was originally meant to connect the north to London.

The North of England is due to receive £2.5 billion and the Midlands £2.2 billion.

Whitehall said the improvements will include building new roads and improving junctions, filling in potholes, increasing EV charging points and refurbishing bus and railway stations.

It added that the funding sits alongside £8.3 billion to resurface roads across the country, £1 billion to improve bus services in the North and Midlands, and £200million to extend the £2 bus fare cap across England – also from redirected HS2 funding.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said: "Through reallocating HS2 funding, we’re not only investing billions of pounds directly back into our smaller cities, towns and rural areas across the North and Midlands, but we are also empowering their local leaders to invest in the transport projects that matter most to their communities - this is levelling up in action."

Sunak said the local transport fund would "benefit more people, in more places, more quickly than HS2 ever would have done, and comes alongside the billions of pound worth of funding we’ve already invested into our roads, buses and local transport services across the country".

Maria Machancoses, the chief executive of Midlands Connect, the partnership of LEPs and councils across the Midlands added: "This funding represents a significant investment in our region’s infrastructure. The Midlands contributes more than £90billion to the UK economy, and to boost that even more, we need reliable transport networks and investment in new technology."

The government said the investment demonstrated its "commitment" to reinvest all of the £19.8 billion from the Northern leg of HS2 in the North and all of the £9.6 billion from the Midlands leg in the Midlands, while the £6.5 billion saved through the new approach at Euston would be spread across every other region in the country.

"We’re already delivering the biggest ever increase in funding for local road improvements with an extra £8.3 billion, enough to resurface more than 5,000 miles of local roads across England, with the first tranche of funding already being delivered right from this financial year," it said in a statement.

"As part of this, we’re providing an additional £2.8 billion to resurface roads in the East, South-East and South-West England and London."