This was not a good budget for transport. There was some positive aspects such as the confirmation of some long announced railway schemes and there was £100m for active travel. Oh yes, the motoring lobby may feel they have chalked up a victory by stopping the fuel duty rise – or rather preventing the Conservative cut in fuel duty from being scrapped – but even they have lost a number of key road schemes for which, frankly, good riddance.
None of this could do anything more than cover up the fact that the whole approach was deeply disappointing. Many railway projects remain in limbo, as pointed out by the Railway Industry Association Darren Caplan given that it is five years since we were promised a schedule for rail enhancement projects and it has still not been forthcoming.
So pretty unexciting and certainly not groundbreaking, but It is the lack of a coherent thread through the various policies that is so disappointing. It really seems that it is policy by numbers, without any clear political rationale behind it. The £100m for cycling and walking is far less than expected and none of the announcements give the impression that they are underpinned by a well thought out policy.
This was well illustrated when Budget week began with a clearly deliberate leak about bus fares. There was informed speculation that the £2 maximum fare cap, imposed to help the industry recover after the pandemic, would be abolished. In the event, this was a typical political tactic of leaking out the worst case scenario only to then turn it around by announcing that is bad, but not quite as bad. A very familiar and dishonest ploy, as it turned out that the cap would be raised to £3 in the New Year. Moreover, there was no long term commitment to create a permanent cap.
This was followed by the speech itself, which as my friend the political commentator Steve Richards said to me afterwards, was ‘poor for transport’. Rachel Reeves first reiterated a series of schemes that are already underway, such as East West Rail and the Transpennine upgrade which emphasised electrification of the line between York and Church Fenton (population 1,392), which clearly must have sent the political journalists covering the speech to consult their handy rail atlases. This they would have discovered refers to all of 11 miles of electrification, hardly worth mentioning in a speech which was all about filling black holes of tens of billions of pounds. Rattling things off rather like WH Auden in the Night Mail, but without the rhyming cadence, she then mentioned ‘upgrades at Bradford Forster Square, improving capacity at Manchester Victoria and electrifying the Wigan-Bolton line’. So it’s all happening up north according to the MP for Leeds West.
She also added that her Right Honourable Friend, Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary ‘has also set out a plan for how to get a grip of HS2’ but unfortunately we are so far not been blessed with being able to see it. However, in what was the most important part of the speech for the railways, she confirmed that the tunnelling between Old Oak Common and Euston would be going ahead. This has long been rumoured and was not really a surprise since retaining the scheme as the Acton to Aston shuttle was never viable. Indeed, I claim some credit for this as the slightly inaccurate Acton to Aston moniker which I devised for the scheme was proving embarrassing. But again, there were no details of how Euston station itself will be funded, though it is clear that the Tories’ attempts to get private funding for the whole scheme were always going to fail. My informed sources suggest that initially, at least, the Euston terminus might just be a shed with corrugated iron for cover (I jest slightly) covering the six platforms. Perhaps the model is Canberra Kingston station, which is little more than a shed miles outside the centre of to
How much the tunnelling will cost or when it will be finished was not revealed. Given that the HS2’s financial situation is as opaque as the London smogs of my childhood, who knows what the final bill will be for the Euston to Aston (or rather Handsacre Junction) line which, so far is the only section which is certain to be built given there was no news on the Birmingham – Manchester section. In other words, we got tidbits about tiny sections of electrification but nothing on the key section of HS2.
After the mention of HS2, Reeves turned her attention to potholes and therefore omitted to mention various transport matters which are in the famous Red Book that fills out the details of Budget speeches. It is there that we discover that regulated train fares are to go up by 4.6 per cent in the New Year, not quite the 50 per cent increase in the bus cap but disappointing nevertheless for a government intent on promoting sustainability and reaching net zero, especially given the fuel tax paralysis. Has anyone, for example, calculated the elasticity of these increases – in other words, the relationship between how much income the rise will bring in compared with the loss of patronage as a result of higher fares? The railway is now a very different beast than before Covid, with much more discretionary use, which is far more price sensitive than the captive usage by season ticket holders. And as far tacking on £5 to railcards to bring in paltry amount of revenue – just unspeakable.
In sum, the budget has, yet again, skewed the price signals in favour of motorists and against sustainable transport modes. We have yet to hear Labour’s transport minister clearly setting out why financial support for public transport is not a subsidy or a welfare benefit to the feckless poor, but rather the means by which the economy and the wellbeing of the population are improved. Haigh, to her credit, has spoken of the links between transport and health, and has, apparently, understood that people cycling, walking and using public transport are likely to be healthier than car drivers and therefore represent a boost to the NHS. This budget, though, reflects none of that thinking.
As a long time supporter of Labour and, indeed, a former Parliamentary candidate, this scatterbrain approach to transport in general and railways in particular makes me wonder what this government is for. If it is not using its power to achieve the bigger aims of reducing inequality and moving towards Net Zero, then what is it trying to achieve? Given the various crises the world faces from climate change to conflict, the pusillanimous approach to transport policy does not bode well for any wider ambitions that Keir Starmer has promised. A coherent transport policy requires courage and a clear sense of direction. Unfortunately, both seem to have gone missing.
Borders Rail as realistic proposition
My travels around the country to give talks on my books took me to the lovely city of Carlisle last month to speak at the annual general meeting of the Borders Rail campaign whose aim is to reopen the line between the city and Edinburgh. That would build on the fantastically successful reopening of about a third of the old Waverley route from Edinburgh to Tweedbank nearly a decade ago.
The success of Borders Rail which has stimulated much regeneration in the area south of Edinburgh shows how transport projects can be the catalyst for economic development. It is a lesson that has been well learnt over history and yet, with the need for detailed business cases and the whole paraphernalia of development schemes, it takes years, if not decades, to get a scheme like this underway and there is currently a £10m government commitment to spend on an assessment of the scheme – but so far it has been stuck in the bureaucracy.
Superficially, it may seem a big ask to reopen nearly 70 miles of railway through relatively sparsely populated borders country. Yet, it is a deprived area with massive tourist potential which could be centred on Hawick and its world-famous woollen mills which produce amazing clothing. As Marion Short, the energetic chair of the campaign explained to me as she was off to get the bus to Hawick which operates a three hourly service on Sundays: towns like Hawick suffer terribly from not having good transport links to the south or the north – the railway would transform a large area between Tweedbank and Carlisle.’ But as I wrote in the last issue, this requires a major reappraisal of how transport projects are funded and there was no mention of that in the budget.
As an aside, at the meeting there was an amazing presentation by Steve Bradley of the Irish Into the West campaign. I had not realised the extent to which the railways in Northern Ireland are concentrated in the east of the island, with only one line, stretching out to Derry, in the west. As Bradley pointed out, the deprivation and poverty in the west of Northern Ireland is rooted in its poor communications and reviving the railways closed by the Irish version of the Beeching cuts would be a major boost to the local economy. I intend to go there in the New Year to write in more detail about this rather forgotten area of railway history and the well-organised campaign to restore at least some of the closed lines.