Rachel Reeves wants to level up your commute. Does she have the money?
'Biggest ever investment in city region local transport as Chancellor vows the 'Renewal of Britain',' trumpeted a government press release on 4 June. It was one of those headlines that feels like it should come with a '[citation needed]' tag. Have they accounted for inflation? When they say 'city region', are they gerrymandering to only count places officially designated by this relatively recent term? The total cash adds up to £15.6bn. There's a risk of apples and oranges here; yet it seems at least worth noting that London's Elizabeth Line cost £18.8bn.
But let's hold the cynicism for the moment, because all this looks suspiciously like that rarest thing: good news from Rachel Reeves. The announcement more than doubles the real terms capital funding for nine city regions from 2027/28 to 2031/32: £2.4bn for the West Midlands, £2.5bn for Greater Manchester and so on. The list of 'projects likely to be taken forward by mayors' that accompanies it includes a dizzying number of potential schemes: an eastern extension of the Midlands Metro; new tram stops and a potential Stockport extension for Manchester's Metrolink; new rolling stock and station upgrades on the Sheffield Supertram; and so on.
All this is cheering, even if you're not the sort of person who can while away a happy hour looking at public transport maps of cities you've never even visited, because there are reasons to think poor transport is one cause of Britain's economic malaise. Productivity, after all, tends to correlate with city size, and poor connectivity means that our cities are functionally a lot smaller than they look: the transport and economy writer Tom Forth has shown that traffic congestion means that Birmingham functionally shrinks by half in rush hour. It's not just that cities with good public transport are nicer, though they are: it's that, by linking employers with a larger pool of potential employees, they're often more prosperous.
It's good news for political reasons, too. So much of what this government is doing – including, probably, the bulk of next week's spending review – feels unnervingly like presiding over decline. This isn't that. It has been pitched as a move towards rewriting the 'Green Book', the guidance the Treasury uses to value potential spending commitments – and which tends, because of London's prosperity and sheer size, to funnel money to the south-east. By allocating money to other regions, between them containing nearly 18 million people – over a third of England's population outside London – it's a baby step towards the levelling up the last government promised but failed to deliver.
Not everyone is convinced: plenty warn this all has unnerving parallels with Rishi Sunak's proposals for 'Network North', which was neither a network nor really about the north. (The list of projects included stretched, hilariously, to Plymouth.) But I think that's too kind to Sunak and unfair on Reeves: there is a difference between a rapidly assembled list of unfunded projects press-released to counteract some bad headlines about the dismemberment of HS2 and an actual funding announcement by a sitting Chancellor.
Will it be truly transformative? There appear to be a few shortcomings. For example, absent from the announcement is the long-awaited and repeatedly cancelled rebuild of Manchester Piccadilly station, which has long acted as a bottleneck for rail services across the north. Another absence is HS2 itself, which (sing along if you know the tune) would increase capacity on local services by getting fast trains out of the way. These would do wonders for multiple city regions – but they are excluded, presumably either because they are not 'city region' projects but strategic rail ones, or because they just cost too much.
The last critique concerns the politics. It's great to see a government breaking with tradition and increasing, rather than slashing, capital funding – but the reason most chancellors tend to cut is because these projects take so long to show any benefits. The suggested timeline for the proposed West Yorkshire Mass Transit is both illustrative and absurd: 'spades in the ground' by 2028, the first services in the mid 2030s. Until then, it won't transform the economy, and may not help much at the next election – it could, in fact, do the opposite, by mobilising opponents who fear disruption to roads. It's good to see a chancellor invest. Let's hope she doesn't regret it.
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[See more: Inside No 10's new dysfunction]
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