Public transport faces cuts of 30% or more as the Government pays back what it borrowed to beat the recession, a Labour member of the Commons transport committee claims.

Manchester Blackley MP, Graham Stringer, told a conference in the city that health and education would be protected.

He said: ‘Those IOUs will come in and have to be paid. That means a lot of public expenditure cuts will fall on transport. It will be possibly as much as 30%, but it will be more than the average, there is no doubt about that.’

Mr Stringer, who claimed that transport spending in London last year was £826 per head compared with £309 per head in the North West, added: ‘When you look at where that money is going – public-private partnerships for the Tube, Crossrail, and Thameslink in London – the cuts will not be 30% for the English regions, they will be significantly more.’

Because of Greater Manchester’s Transport Innovation Fund (TIF) referendum last December, he said, the area probably had the ‘most transport sensitised electorate in the country,’ which understood the issues.

‘They are saying that London can’t have everything, and the answer is brutal: Stop Crossrail and spend the money on the pinch points in the Manchester rail system – which affect the whole of the North – and on starting to build the high-speed rail network.’

He said the threatened cuts would not reign in Greater Manchester’s £1.5bn ‘Plan B’ of Metrolink extensions and other transport improvements, which was drawn up after congestion charging was rejected in a public referendum, ending hopes of £3bn of TIF money.

‘The clerk to Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority [Sir Howard Bernstein] assures me that the contracts will be signed and the money will be spent,’ he said.

‘You can never be 100% sure but it is as certain as it possibly can be.’

Plan B involves pooling resources from local, regional, and national transport funding.