Transport

Sheffield Chamber are actively campaigning to ensure that Sheffield is directly connected on a regional, national and international scale.

Good transport infrastructure is an absolute necessity for business. Sheffield is poorly served in many areas of road (east west), rail (north south and east west) and air (internationally competitive business services from a local airport).

High Speed 2 (HS2) and Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) have the potential to vastly improve our rail connectivity (north-south and east-west respectively) and add much needed capacity and quality of service to our city.

Sheffield Chamber have actively campaigned to ensure that Sheffield is directly connected to HS2, if and when it is built.

Our simple logic is that if Sheffields big neighbours (such as Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham and Manchester) are connected, but Sheffield was not, it would put the city at a serious disadvantage when competing for the inward investments needed for a strong future economy.

Good transport infrastructure is an absolute. We have developed a simple check list of all the reasons we support HS2 which can be viewed below. HS2 will massively improve our connectivity to Leeds, York, Durham, Newcastle and Edinburgh in the north, and to Derby, Nottingham, Birmingham and London in the South. Journey times will be improved, however for the Chamber the major benefits are capacity and the environmental benefits.

NPR is designed to improve the east west connectivity between the Northern Powerhouse cities. It stretches from Liverpool in the west to Hull in the east and from Sheffield in the south to Newcastle in the north. Parts of NPR use some of the new HS2 lines like the connection between Sheffield and Leeds. For Sheffield, the priority is to improve the connectivity to Manchester via the Hope Valley line and we wish to deliver an absolute minimum of 3 fast (40min) trains per hour.

Whilst the Chamber is lobbying hard to get HS2 and NPR confirmed we also recognise the need to improve road connectivity to Manchester, to build an East Coast Mainline railways station at Doncaster Sheffield Airport, to extend Supertram significantly and to improve local transport infrastructure. These are more likely to be achieved through devolved resources and decision making trough Devolution.