It is 1993 and a young James Lewis is going to do work experience in Leeds city council’s highways department. His team, Leeds United FC, have only just relinquished the title of defending English champions. And the council is marching on with big ideas: putting the abandoned 1980s Metroline tram plan behind them, and forgetting the unloved 1991 concept of a Leeds Advanced Transit skytrain. The Supertram is the coming thing.

“I remember these drawers and drawers, full of big paper plans,” says Lewis, 33 years on. Lewis is now leader of the city council, and it is all done online. Much of the city centre has been transformed, rebuilt and pedestrianised. Leeds United have never threatened to be champions again. But as Lewis stands outside Elland Road stadium, explaining how to cross the adjacent motorway, one thing has not changed. What Leeds really wants is to build a tram.

Funding for that Supertram was eventually promised by the incoming Labour government only to be withdrawn in 2005, deemed not worth the expense. A cheaper alternative, a trolleybus network, was dropped in 2016.

Now the government has given fresh backing for the latest iteration, West Yorkshire Mass Transit. As outlined by the mayor of the combined authority, Tracy Brabin, over the past four years, that should be an integrated network of buses around two tram lines, one through south Leeds and another linking neighbouring Bradford.

Development money totalling £200m has been given, and future funding available from £2.1bn allocated to the city region. But, after warnings in a critical independent review of the plans carried out for the Treasury, the government has also insisted that West Yorkshire adhere to its strict process – rather than what Brabin likes to call her “trailblazer approach”.

That means working up a fresh business case, proving the need for trams not buses, and then reheating consultations. This will push the opening date for any tram back into the late 2030s. Some see it as proof of serious commitment; others, a familiar story of eternal delay.

Brabin says it was disappointing, and some, she acknowledges, “are now saying, that’s it, of course we’re not going to get anything, it’s cancelled”. She insists it has “just knocked us on two years, but we are still on track”.

Leeds is the biggest city in Europe without a mass transit system. It had trams, once: doubledeckers that ran through city centre streets and up leafy tracks, canned in 1959. There are wide roads aplenty, partly the inheritance of 1970s town planning for a booming “motorway city”. The M621 flanking Elland Road is now seen as having cut off the south of the city from prosperity.

Buses come this way, but on a match day, most people walk the two miles from the centre to the stadium. No route is pinned down yet, but Lewis says a tram line will probably “float over or under the motorway, a bit like the Docklands Light Railway”. Previous proposals, he says, have faltered through trying to squeeze trams on to existing bus routes and roads. This, he says, is going to be different: anchoring the city and linking institutions such as the White Rose shopping centre, the stadium, the main railway station and St James’s hospital with what he calls “legible, easy to use, high-quality public transport”.

He says of the latest delay: “Rachel Reeves has allocated a lot of money. It was someone taking a very clear-eyed view of how long it takes to get a scheme through a public inquiry. It wasn’t someone sitting in London saying: ‘Leeds can wait another five years.’”

Not all are convinced. Greg Marsden, a professor at Leeds University’s Institute for Transport Studies, says: “We’re taking 18 years to build a tram line. How can that possibly be the case?”

The latest scheme was in itself a sop for the loss of HS2: the planned north-eastern leg of the high-speed rail network linking London, Manchester and Leeds. It was ended under Boris Johnson, in 2021; better, he said, for West Yorkshire to get on with mass transit.

Since then, says Marsden: “There’s been quite a lot of process, proposals for a whole network, consultation. To be saying we’re not yet in a position to go ahead smacks of a lack of real commitment.”

Tom Forth, a co-founder of the Data City company information group in Leeds, says the “the root cause is that the Department for Transport is based in London, the Treasury is based in London, the political decision was taken in London. There needs to be local tax-raising. If we had devolution we would get this stuff done.”

Forth and Marsden point to France, which has built tram systems paid for and decided locally rather than having to prove the value for money to a sceptical Treasury.

“Do we believe that, even if the numbers don’t look compelling on a benefit cost ratio, that it would actually change Leeds, it would change connectivity in the region?” Marsden says. “There has to be an element of build-it-and-they-will-come, Field of Dreams stuff.”

Forth says it feeds into “that lingering sense that Britain can’t build anything.”. The Heathrow third runway is more explicable, he says.“Lots of people don’t want it built. But Leeds really does want the tram.”

The Leeds United investor and director Pete Lowy is a vocal backer. Work to expand the stadium by 15,000 seats is under way, and mass transit will have a major bearing on how they develop the surrounding site – potentially bringing in £1bn of investment to build 2,500 new homes, work, retail and leisure spaces. He says: “If the tram goes ahead and the city gets this right, then we can help transform that part of Leeds. This is about much more than match days. It is a real opportunity for Leeds to bring together infrastructure, housing, investment and regeneration in a way that could have a lasting impact.”

Leeds South Bank was last month shortlisted as one of the government’s new towns, potentially accelerating the growth of the city. The higher-rise centre has spread south, reaching empty brownfield sites and industrial estates at Sweet Street, the location of the legendary ex-striker Peter Lorimer’s Commercial Inn. Closed, ransacked and firebombed since 2018, it has recently been adorned with “positive energy” murals by the Yorkshire artist Kid Acne, a landmark for a neighbouring development site for offices and 1,350 flats.

Not all of the Leeds public appears convinced of the need for mass transit. A builder leaving the Sweet Street site says: “Leeds is not big enough for a tram. It’s not like Manchester; that’s massive.”

Gladys Crosby, studying to be a personal trainer, is walking home to Holbeck. A direct link to the A&E across the city would help, she says, but she does not hold out much hope: “My whole life they’ve said it’s going to get better – I’m 24 now.”

Over in Armley, the inner city side of Reeves’s Leeds West constituency primed to benefit from the Bradford line, an elderly couple is waiting for an Uber. Would they welcome the tram? “Ooh yes,” she says. But the man says: “They closed down the year I was born. It’ll never happen.”

At the far end of the second planned line, Henri Murison, the chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, is standing on a windswept road bridge above Bradford interchange, pointing out a new building. A large clinic is the start of what he hopes will be a swathe of further urban regeneration, the city’s South Gateway project, prompted by the tram. “This is not hypothetical: that is provable investment coming in right now on the back of promised transport development.”

In Murison’s reading, the delay is welcome: doing it by the letter of Treasury process with ministerial backing makes it less likely to meet the fate of the 1990s Supertram.

The pledge of “spades in the ground” by 2028, for preparatory works of some kind, remains, Brabin says. Until then, the team will focus their energy on improving existing bus services.

Buses will come under public control in 2027. According to Rob Johnson of the Centre for Cities, right now “the single most consequential thing Leeds could do is to increase frequencies on its existing bus services”. In a study he found less than half of the city’s 800,000 residents, about 390,000, were well connected, and better buses alone would connect more than new trams.

But Lewis and Brabin argue the point of the tram is not only to improve existing journeys but to underpin massive development.

For Brabin, trams are “more attractive, they take more people, they deliver more jobs and growth. They’re more reliable.

“I promised tram, and tram is what we’re going to get.”

Plans to change the size of HS2 trains to maximise capacity are likely to inflate costs and mean fewer seats and slower services north of Birmingham, a senior government and rail industry figure has warned.

The £2bn order for 54 high-speed trains, to be built in Britain by a joint venture of Alstom and Hitachi, is under review as HS2 Ltd seeks to cut costs and renegotiate contracts.

The order was placed by the government in 2021, before the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2 by Rishi Sunak in 2023. The 200m-long eight-carriage units were expected to double into 16-carriage trains, the size of a Eurostar. But that will now only be possible on the new line between London and Birmingham, with existing stations such as Manchester Piccadilly unable to accommodate a 400m-long train.

Limited to eight carriages, HS2 services will reduce capacity on the conventional railway line north of Birmingham, where the Pendolino trains currently operating are faster and longer – a situation the Department for Transport (DfT) and HS2 Ltd officials are seeking to avoid, potentially by ordering longer trains.

An option under consideration at HS2 is to order about 43 longer trains, at 250m-long, which could run to most stations.

However, Chris Gibb, a non-executive director of DfT Operator (DFTO), the state-owned rail operating company, has broken ranks to warn against varying the train order, which he said could pile on extra costs and still leave HS2 unable to match west coast main line fleets.

The Hitachi-Alstom trains would not be able to tilt like the Pendolinos used by Avanti West Coast, limiting their speed on curved conventional tracks, Gibb said.

He told politicians and industry representatives at the all-party parliamentary rail group in Westminster that despite his role and being a “keen advocate of HS2” for 18 years, he was speaking out in a personal capacity “because I feel obliged to offer leadership by example and to act in the public interest”.

Gibb said there could be “no doubt that if HS2 opened by replacing 11-coach Pendolinos with eight-coach trains these would be full and leave people behind on day one”.

But to change the contract, he said, would cost time and money – and each of the potential contract variations had downsides, including wasting work already done on HS2 stations and depots.

Gibb said the government should instead retain the original train order with Alstom and Hitachi, avoiding contractual penalties and delays. But it should also plan to replace the current Pendolino fleet with longer, faster, modern versions, ready for when HS2 services start running to the north around 2040.

He said this would “give a significant increase in capacity, revenue and a reduction in journey times on all routes, with no further railway construction needed for now”.

Lord McLoughlin, who was transport secretary when HS2 was voted into law, said “it’s a tragedy where we are now”, but questioned whether Gibb’s plan would also incur significant cost. Gibb said that he would “anticipate it’s a cost saving” as the railway would require fewer Pendolinos overall.

Lord Berkeley, a long-term HS2 sceptic, backed Gibb’s idea, saying: “It could be 2040 or 2050 [when services began]. Let’s have one consistent type of rolling stock so you can keep using them in any circumstances.”

Gibb said he did not know if the order would be varied. But there is widespread speculation that the contract could be amended at the long-awaited “reset” of HS2’s schedule and budget by chief executive, Mark Wild, which is now under discussion with ministers.

A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said: “The Hitachi-Alstom joint venture is contracted to deliver a fleet of 54 new trains for HS2. No changes have been made to the original order.”

HS2 said they were still working closely with the manufacturer and the DfT to finalise train designs ahead of production. The trains will be built in Derby and Newton Aycliffe.

The DfT was approached for comment.

Drivers who choose SUVs are compounding the pothole problem, experts have warned, as research showed hundreds of thousands of people bought bigger cars to navigate damaged roads.

Scientists said the cumulative effect of increasing numbers of heavier vehicles was a contributory factor in Britain’s potholes getting worse.

SUVs made up more than half of the 2m new cars sold in the UK last year, and a smaller but growing proportion of the 7m secondhand cars sold.

Recent polling showed almost one in eight drivers in parts of the country, including London and Yorkshire, had chosen to buy an SUV or heavier car partly due to concerns about road conditions.

According to the Opinium research, carried out for Kwikfit, 6% of drivers nationwide said they had been influenced to buy or bought an SUV primarily because of the condition of roads, a proportion that doubled among those who had suffered damage to their vehicle.

However, experts said those buyers were contributing to the problem they seek to avoid; furthermore, their vehicle and would not be immune to damage.

While the primary reason for pothole formation remained the freezing and thawing of rainwater over wet winters, and the heaviest vehicles, such as lorries, were likely to cause immediate damage, the growing weight of cars was worsening road surfaces.

Dr Ali Rahman, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds, said “the rising prevalence of SUVs does exacerbate pothole formation, because higher axle loads increase surface stresses, crack initiation, and road wear. They contribute a secondary but growing share of the problem, especially in cities where the road network was not designed for heavier passenger vehicles.”

Prof Anna Goodman, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “The typical SUV exerts around five times more force on the road than the typical passenger car. The dramatic shift to SUVs in the past 20 years – from 3% of cars on the road in England to over 30% – is expected to have played some role in increasing wear and tear damage.”

Prof Christian Brand, the emeritus professor in transport at Kellogg College, Oxford, said SUVs were typically 200-300kg heavier than hatchback or sedan cars. While a single truck could do as much damage as many cars, “the rapid growth in SUVs means their cumulative impact, particularly on urban roads with lighter construction, may not be negligible and is increasingly relevant for local maintenance pressures”.

The Institution of Civil Engineers has said that heavier vehicles – also including electric cars – are a factor in pothole formation and reducing the lifespan of roads.

London is considering imposing extra charges on large SUVs, mainly due to the added safety risk they pose to other road users, as well as the space they take up. Transport for London is conducting studies on their effects on safety and congestion prior to announcing possible measures.

A spokesperson for the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “As part of their research TfL will look at the full impact of the continued growth in size and weight of these large SUVs, including any impact they have on the state and condition of London’s roads.”

According to an annual industry estimate by the Asphalt Industry Alliance, a road repair trade body, the cost of fixing all potholes and local roads across England and Wales has reached a record £18.6bn.

Steve Gooding, the director of the RAC Foundation, said: “Is it any wonder people are turning to rugged off-road oriented vehicles with the shocking state of many roads? Big wheels with all-terrain tyres are a better bet for bouncing over potholes but rarely come with the smaller, lighter cars that drivers might otherwise choose as perfectly suitable for the trips they need to make.”

Jack Cousens, the head of roads policy at the AA, said: “Sadly, all vehicles are at the mercy of potholes – regardless of what someone is driving, potholes are causing damage.”