Andy Burnham calls out ridiculous price of 15 minute train journey from Manchester

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has reiterated his stance on London-style fares after sharing the cost of a fifteen minute train journey he took from Manchester. 

Burnham tweeted a picture of his train ticket, an off-peak single journey from Manchester stations to Newton Le Willows, with a price of £8 printed along the bottom.

The mayor wrote: “Public transport is so expensive in our part of the world. This is the cost of a one-stop, 20-minute journey [later corrected to fifteen minutes]. To be levelled up, we need London-level fares. Accept nothing less.”

This isn’t the first time Burnham has spoken publicly about the benefits a London-style public transport system would provide to Greater Manchester; last month, he spoke about the proposed system at the Transport for the North conference in Leeds.

He insisted that fares set at £1.55, just like they are in the capital, would have ‘the potential to elevate’ millions of Northern residents and predicted that the set fare system could be in place by mid-2024 with Greater Manchester due to take buses back into public control under a franchising system from 2023.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Burnham said: “We could be a template for the rest of the North, particularly for combined authorities where the powers do exist to put buses under public control.

“We think what we would do would be helpful to Leeds, helpful to Liverpool and helpful to other places as they look to go down a similar path. It’s perfectly doable.”

He added that in Greater Manchester, buses could be ‘integrated with the tram system’, suggesting that commuters would have a ‘daily cap on what they could expect to pay on any given day, no matter how many buses or trams they took.'”

Rishi Sunak is due to unveil his Spending Review covering the spending priorities up to 2025 along with an Autumn Budget on October 27th.