Interview
Rail Professional interview: Geoff Inskip
Birmingham wants to link as much to Manchester and Leeds as it does to London
The chief executive of Centro tells Alan Salter how he traded trams for buses when he transferred from Manchester’s GMPTE to the West Midlands
L
ife looks pretty rosy for the man who, in search of the top job, quit one of England’s biggest cities for another. After leaving Manchester, not only
did Geoff Inskip take charge in the West Midlands as Centro chief executive, but he
has now become, arguably, the most important public transport official in the country as the new chairman of the Passenger Transport Executive Group (PTEG). Add to that almost £400m from the government
for the Birmingham New Street redevelopment, the promise of the first stop on the government’s northern bound high speed rail route, government approval to extend Midland Metro through the heart of Birmingham and a business community with a keen interest in transport infrastructure, and he could be forgiven for believing that the grass is greener at the southern end of the M6.
He moved to Birmingham five years ago, stepping
up to the PTEG role earlier this year. As PTEG chairman, he has the ear of transport secretary Philip Hammond and he has told him that it would make sense to start building the high speed rail line south from Scotland to meet the line from London somewhere in the middle. Although he sees the obvious benefits for
Birmingham of the approaching line from London – ‘We expect a lot of people to move out of London towards the West Midlands, which will be great because that is where they’ll spend their six figure salaries’ – he believes that it is just as important to complete the links north. ‘The one thing that I do think about high speed rail is
that Birmingham wants to link as much to Manchester and Leeds as it does to London. We are very keen that the ‘Y’ network takes place. The connections between Manchester and Birmingham are far too long,’ he says. ‘I think it’s really important to go to Scotland. Talking
JU AE 2011 PAGE 21 MNY 2010
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