News – latest at top
May 2025:
2 May 2025: Helen Godwin is elected Mayor of the West of England Combined Authority in the 2025 Combined Authority Mayoral Election replacing Dan Norris.
March 2025:
14 March: The West of England Combined Authority Committee approved the allocation of the £27m funding to enable the project to go ahead. (WECA news item has been deleted).
February 2025:
10 Feb 2025: West of England Combined Authority Mayor Dan Norris announced today that a landmark agreement with the Government on plans for the railway has been reached. The Mayor led crunch talks in London with Rail Minister Lord Peter Hendy last week and now the minister has written to him with confirmation of the deal for a go-ahead. (WECA news item has been deleted) See North Somerset News.
This paves the way for construction to begin this summer.
January 2025:
Restoring the rail line between Bristol to Portishead could be "fast-tracked", with construction beginning this year and the first trains running by 2027. North Somerset Council leaders have approved measures to start construction - if the government agrees to fund the project. See BBC report 22 Jan 2025.
December 2024:
The Treasury spending review, of which the Portishead & Pill line reopening is one small part, is still under way and will continue until March or April next year.
Update from PRG: PRG has been consulting carefully with many sources. The Public Petition, presented in Parliament in September by Sadik al Hassan MP, was very well and widely received in Whitehall. The mood in Whitehall about reopening the Portishead line is still positive. The final decision will be a financial one about spending across the whole of government. The Portishead line will be just a tiny part of that. This could be good or bad news. No one, including our MP, will know what that decision is until the Treasury review outcome is made public.
The reopening project is still live and work by the MetroWest team is continuing. The budget has been reduced (to an undisclosed figure) with the aim of delivering a minimum specification solution. This means things like platforms will be designed for 5-car trains, but built to accommodate 3-car trains initially. If funding is secured, the reopened line will still have two stations – Pill and Portishead – as intended. There is much discussion about why the cost of repairing existing bridges and tunnels along the line should be borne by the Reopening project, rather than by Network Rail's maintenance budget for the existing freight line.
This is the only railway reopening project in the country that is currently under way and at an advanced stage of development. A positive decision on funding next Spring would allow the project to be completed before the next General Election in 2029.
November 2024:
On 4 November Sadik Al-Hassan, MP for North Somerset made his maiden speech in the House of Commons. In the speech he said: ‘No maiden speech on North Somerset would be complete without a mention of the Portishead railway line. First opened in 1867, the line proved a vital link in connecting the people of North Somerset to Bristol, and then to the wider country. For nearly 25 years now, the campaign to reopen the line has raged fiercely in my constituency, and I want to reassure my constituents that I intend to fight tooth and nail to see that project across the line after decades of false starts.’
September 2024:
Our petition has now closed and has been delivered to Sadik Al-Hassan, MP for North Somerset, who then presented it to the House of Commons.
August 2024:
PRG has agreed with Sadik Al-Hassan, MP for North Somerset, that to keep the pressure on the Treasury and DfT to find the funds to see the project through, we should organise a Public Petition (paper not e-petition) which he will present to the House of Commons. PRG members are collecting signatures around the area. More details of petition and latest numbers here …
The Sept 2024 issue of Today’s Railways magazine, has an article in which Sadik Al-Hassan, MP for North Somerset, is quoted as saying that he had had it confirmed to him that the Bristol-Portishead reopening, part of the MetroWest scheme that predated the 2020 Restoring Your Railway programme, is safe not least as Network Rail is about to submit what seems like the 493rd update of its business case.
This project has not been cancelled but will be subject to a Government review. Almost all the funding for the Portishead project has been in place for years, but did not come from the Restoring your Railways fund except for a final proportion required to cover delays and cost increases.
Old redundant rails from the track bed are being removed, with permission from the MetroWest project, for use by the Avon Valley Railway, starting with the track behind Sainsburys.
July 2024:
29 July: The Chancellor Rachel Reeves has cancelled the Restoring your Railways fund.
PRG comment: Currently, there seems to be no definite announcement of cancellation of this project. We need to await the outcome of a review but in the meantime, please contact your MP to say that the railway opening should go ahead because otherwise the investment of many £millions of local money spent to date will have been wasted.
The Detailed Design is complete and the Final Business Case is ready for the Treasury to review. The agreement was that central government will provide the top-up funding and fund the inflation risk, not provide the total funding. That is why not going ahead (delay OR cancellation) would be such a waste of the spend to date, which cannot be recovered.
North Somerset Council News item 29 July 2024 …
June 2024:
The General Election has unfortunately put the process on hold for some time, and will cause some slippage. The Full Business Case has not been submitted yet.
May 2024:
Submission of the Full Business Case to DfT has been delayed but is expected to take place this month.
April 2024:
A new planning application has been submitted with a revised design for Pill station. Details …
March 2024:
A new planning application has been submitted with a revised design for Portishead station.
January 2024:
Planning permission has been submitted for some early works.
At North Somerset’s Full Council meeting held on 9 Jan, members decided on proposals for the Full Business Case currently being developed. The proposals give the Leader of the Council and Executive Member for Major Infrastructure Projects, authority to finalise the completed case on behalf of North Somerset Council, ready for its submission to the Department for Transport (DfT) in late February (now mid April). See MetroWest latest news January …