UNIONS slammed Rishi Sunak’s claims that £4.7 billion saved from scrapping the northern leg of HS2 will be put into a “transformational” local transport fund that can be used to fill potholes and refurbish bus stops.

The Prime Minister said that the funding would be earmarked for schemes in the north of England and the Midlands from April 2025 as he gathered his Cabinet in Yorkshire and the Humber.

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: “The local transport fund is a gimmick designed to hide the fact that the Tories have totally failed railway passengers by scrapping HS2.

“The ability of people to travel on environmentally friendly high-speed rail across every part of the country should be a priority for any government who is interested in promoting economic activity.

“We will continue to press the case for a publicly owned and integrated transport system that is cheap efficient and serves the economic and leisure needs of the passengers and is in the best interests of railway workers.”

TSSA general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust said: “The Conservative government has once again shown that it is totally lacking ambition.

“This redirection of funding will do nothing to fix our crumbling transport infrastructure that has suffered from 14 years of Tory mismanagement and neglect.

“Mr Sunak’s government betrayed the north when it announced they were halting HS2 at Birmingham.

“The government is now tinkering around the edges of its broken system and will once again be leaving the public short-changed.”

Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh said: “The Tories have failed and local people are sick and tired of this government taking them for fools.

“Only the Conservatives could have the brass neck to promise yet another ‘transformation’ of transport infrastructure in the Midlands and north after 14 years of countless broken promises to do just that.”

Henri Murison, chief executive of business group the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, told the BBC: “I don’t fundamentally understand why on Earth the Cabinet is coming to simply announce something that they already told us about.”

The Prime Minister said: “We could have carried on with a project that was going to cost well over £100bn, take decades and have a very specific set of benefits, whereas I made a different decision.”

The last time ministers gathered outside of London was for emergency talks before announcing HS2 would be scaled back at last year’s Tory conference.