Louise Haigh has been elected as Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley for the fourth time and has been appointed Transport Minister in the cabinet of new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
We look at Haigh’s history as a politician and in particular the relationship between transport and politics.
Immediately prior to being elected as MP for Sheffield Heeley in the 2015 general election, Haigh spent three years as a public policy manager for multinational insurance company Aviva, where she was responsible for corporate governance and responsible investment policy.
After her election, Haigh’s maiden speech in the House focused on financial services reform. “If we are to secure a sustainable economy that delivers benefits for everyone, we must transform the way our economy works, by encouraging investment in green, productive industries and punishing those short-term industries and practices that have done so much damage to our economy and society,” she said.
Nine months after the 2015 general election, a survey of the 177 new MPs found Haigh to be the most active, having made 90 speeches and asked 471 parliamentary questions during this period.
Within six months of her first election, Haigh became Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office. Over the next four years, she became Shadow Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, and then Shadow Minister for the Home Office.
Her first role in the Shadow Cabinet was as Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, which she took up in April 2020. She held this role until she was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Transport when Starmer reshuffled his Shadow Cabinet in November 2021. She remained Shadow Secretary of State for Transport until the general election in May 2024.
Official portrait of Louise Haigh
Transport focus
Although transport did not appear to be high on her agenda – at least not publicly – before 2021, Haigh was furious about the publication in November 2021 of the Conservative government’s report. Integrated railway plan.
The document confirmed that the eastern branch of High Speed 2 (HS2), from Birmingham to Leeds (via Sheffield), would not go ahead. Furthermore, Northern Powerhouse Rail – long promised as a new high-speed line to connect the northern cities from Liverpool to Hull – would only run between Manchester and Leeds, largely on existing infrastructure.
Eleven days before she was to be appointed Shadow Transport Minister, Haigh gave her views on the Integrated railway plan clearly.
“This report was over 12 months late and absolutely not worth the wait,” she said in a statement. “The Prime Minister has shown the people of the North of England yet again that they do not matter to him or his government.
“Growth and jobs are being held back here because we are not well connected to other cities. It is absolutely ridiculous that the fourth largest city in the UK has no direct connection to an airport.
“The Prime Minister is forcing us to continue to rely on the creaking Victorian infrastructure.”
On social media and in an interview with Sky News, she emphasised the point that Northern Powerhouse Rail had been promised “over 60 times in three different manifestos”.
Six months after becoming Shadow Transport Minister, Haigh spoke at the ASLEF Union Invest In Rail conference and said: “As a proud trade unionist, it is an honour to work with this fantastic union to build the world-class rail network that passengers, workers and the public deserve.”
She supported the unions when the government announced a 10% cut to the sector’s budget.[It] will lead to one thing, and one thing alone: controlled decline,” she said in a video posted to her social media on May 16, 2022.
She continued: “As Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, I see investment in rail and public transport as the engine of the transformation we need to see. Not just because every £1 invested in rail adds £8.50 to the economy, not just because rail accounts for 10% of all passenger journeys but only 1% of carbon emissions, but because rail and public transport connect talented young students to their chosen university, grow employment opportunities for local people and boost the economic opportunities we need to connect our regions and nations and drive investment into the parts of the country that have been neglected for too long.
“That’s why I want to see a continued programme of electrification, Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2 in full. It’s essential to turning the tide in our incredibly unequal country, it’s essential to tackling the climate crisis and it would be a huge vote of confidence in our regions and countries.”
During the rail strikes that have ravaged the country in recent years, Haigh has been a constant critic of the transport secretary. “Grant Shapps refuses to even talk to regional leaders about a plan to restore services. What does the transport secretary do all day?” she asked in August 2022.
At the Labour party conference in September 2022, Haigh first announced Labour’s plans to renationalise the country’s railways.
“[Labour in government] “will give the public back control of the vital public transport they depend on,” she said. “The Labour government we form will end the farce on our railways. We will end the failed experiments, we will throw out the tired dogma that has failed passengers. We will improve services and cut fares and yes, Labour in power will put our railways back into public ownership, where they belong.”
In February 2023, during an appearance at the Northern Transport Summit, Haigh outlined how a Labour government would “support the North and build infrastructure fit for the next century”. This included the full delivery of Northern Powerhouse rail and HS2.
In September 2023, as rumours circulated about Sunak’s plan to cancel the HS2 line from Birmingham to Manchester, Haigh made an angry speech in Parliament.
“What started as a modern infrastructure plan from the last Labour government that connected our major northern cities will, after 13 years of Tory incompetence, waste and broken promises, be a humiliating Tory failure. A major rail betrayal,” she said. “£45 billion and the least possible economic impact of the original plan. £45 billion and the North left with nothing. But honestly […] What would we expect from a prime minister who doesn’t travel around the North of England by train? He just flies over it.”
A few weeks later, after HS2’s cancellation was confirmed and the Network North compensatory document was released, Haigh described it as “an absolute farce”.
While Labour leader Starmer said it was “not possible” to revive HS2 if it came to power because the government had “blown the budget”, Whitehall sources said The Telegraph in March 2024 that Haigh hoped to reinstate Phase 2a between Birmingham and Crewe.
In December 2023, when Labour convened its rail review committee, chaired by former Siemens chief executive Jurgen Maier, Haigh said: “Labour is serious about delivering transport infrastructure fit for the next century. That’s why I’m delighted that Jurgen Maier will lead an expert review to deliver infrastructure better, faster and more cost-effectively.”
While Haigh initially focused on rail, during the election campaign she began promoting roads to counter the Tory onslaught that Labour was waging a war on motorists.
She was the face of Labour’s Plan for the Automotive Sector, which included measures to “tackle our crumbling local roads” and the postponement of the £320m A27 Arundel Bypass scheme, which is said to raise enough money to fix up to 1 million potholes a year.
“We’ll provide local authorities with multi-year funding arrangements so that they have that budget over a longer period of time and they can prevent potholes from happening in the first place,” she said in an interview about the plan for motorists. “I know how frustrating it is for people when they see their local authority come in and fix a pothole and then they have to come back in two or three months and do it again. It’s really poor value for money and it doesn’t increase the lifespan of the road.”
Two weeks before the general election, Haigh said Subway: “Sheffield and Manchester are the two largest neighbouring cities in Europe that do not have a motorway between them.
“Sheffield is the largest city in Europe without a direct rail link to an airport and the North as a whole is losing £16 billion a year in lost growth, thanks to the poor connections, delays and overcrowding we experience on the railways all the time.”
She said her Transport Ministry would publish a long-term strategy to address the problem, in line with the central government’s 10-year infrastructure plan.
“We are not committing to a specific infrastructure plan because we do not yet know the financial position or the state of delivery of much of the infrastructure the Tories have promised,” she added.
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