Reeves signals change – at last

Paul Salveson is encouraged by the Spending Review plans on transport

The Chancellor’s Spending Review was good news for the North – and for public transport. Details on infrastructure spending have yet to be announced, but the overall picture is becoming clear. At last, after many false starts, the North appears to be getting the investment it needs in transport, with rail at the top of the list. Hidden away in the announcement is a very significant statement about the criteria for infrastructure investment: the mysterious “Green Book” used by the Treasury to determine what represents “value for money”. The criteria have been heavily skewed against the North, with too little attention given to wider social, economic and environmental benefits. It has been an issue that environmental campaigners have lobbied over for decades, and it seems that finally someone is listening. A new approach to evaluating schemes ought to reduce our obsession with road-building and big projects, which benefit areas which are already doing OK, such as much of the south-east.

For now, many projects in the North will get substantial funding allocated to them, including light rail projects in Greater Manchester, heavy rail in the Liverpool City Region and other major conurbations. This is welcome and much needed.

Where the statement was weak was addressing infrastructure challenges in less urban areas, such as parts of Cumbria, Northumberland, Durham and Lancashire. Control of the latter two counties recently passed to Reform, and there was little in the statement that would prove them mistaken. In Cumbria, Barrow is to get a large order for new submarines, and the Government’s fixation on nuclear power will benefit Sellafield. Where are the “green” forces in Labour challenging these dangerous ventures?

In many parts of rural Britain, rail closures in the 1960s have left communities very vulnerable – many bus services that tried to fill the gap after your station closed have now gone themselves. There has been a modest revival in some areas through Government-sponsored “bus service improvement plans” for local authorities. In my village, we now have six buses a day instead of three, and they are being well used. No irony intended here – most bus passengers in towns and cities would consider a bus every fifteen minutes at the limit of what’s acceptable. Turning round the damage that has been done to rural public transport is a massive task and won’t be solved by a few “demand responsive” dial-a-ride buses. At the same time, there are many “left-behind” towns across the North which don’t have powerful champions like metro mayors to argue their case, and aren’t “rural” either. Places like Blackburn, Burnley, Accrington, Bacup, Northwich, Consett and others. When investment is made in towns like these, the results can be spectacular. The new line to Ashington, in Northumberland, is already exceeding its targets by a big margin. 

There remains a place for private “open access” operators despite less than supportive noises coming from the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander. Operators such as Grand Central have already brought towns and cities such as Halifax, Sunderland, Bradford and Stockton back on the inter-city map, and there are proposals from several operators, including First and Virgin, to connect other towns across the North. Meanwhile, the great hope of a co-operatively owned train company is running into trouble. Go-op, a co-operative formed to run services in the south-west (and recently awarded access rights subject to some onerous requirements), is facing big financial challenges. Why not a partnership with this Labour government, demonstrating their co-operative credentials?

It’s right that Labour takes a strategic approach to longer-distance transport links. It seems that the Government is poised to give the go-ahead to a new high-speed railway from Liverpool via Manchester Airport, central Manchester, and possibly continuing across the Pennines to Leeds and beyond. Yet the biggest headache facing transport planners in the North is the rail bottleneck through Manchester, which impacts the rail network across the whole of the North of England. Unless this is addressed (and it will benefit freight as well as passenger services), building new railways risks being counter-productive.

The issue of HS2 still hangs like a bad smell over rail investment. Huge sums of money continue to be poured into this calamitous project, which a few isolated voices (like Chartist!) argued against from the start. The general view seems to be that “we’ve got this far, there’s no option but to carry on and get it finished as far as Birmingham.” And I suppose that’s right, but it must not let politicians regard any future major investment in rail as money down the drain. There is still a need for better links between Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, and Scotland – connecting into “Northern Powerhouse Rail” from east to west. Some major lessons have got to be learned from the HS2 fiasco with the Government and its new “guiding mind”, Great British Railways, getting on top of costs.