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Funding for that Supertram was eventually promised by the incoming Labour government only to be withdrawn in 2005, deemed not worth the expense.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.”