Chancellor Rachel Reeves set to promise Wales nearly half a billion pounds for rail
Chancellor Rachel Reeves set to promise Wales nearly half a billion pounds for rail
An initial funding settlement of £445m for new rail projects in Wales will be confirmed by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the Comprehensive Spending Review
Wales is getting a big rise in rail investment from the UK Government.
(Image: Matthew Horwood )
Wales is to receive an initial down payment of at least £445m in the Comprehensive Spending Review to begin to address decades of under investment by successive UK governments in its rail network.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to confirm that the money will be spent on new rail projects in north and south Wales, potentially such as the start of work electrifying part of the North Wales Mainline and up to five new stations between Cardiff and Magor, on the South Wales Mainline.
The expected announcement follows intensive lobbying by the Welsh Government, representations made by Welsh Labour MPs and fierce criticism of historic underfunding by opposition parties. WalesOnline has also been campaigning to end the historic underfunding of railways in Wales.
It's expected that the Welsh Government will welcome the new funding although some questions remain over how it will be divided up. And it is not known if there will be any commitment to provide fairer funding over the long term.
The funding commitment expected in Wednesday's spending review is thought to include a sum of money that the Department for Transport will provide for Network Rail to spend on the track it manages in Wales.
There will also be funding that has been requested by the Welsh Government for it to use to invest in the track it owns and operates in the Core Valley Lines, which was devolved to the Cardiff Bay administration so it could electrify it and create the south Wales metro.
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WalesOnline has been campaigning to end second-class treatment of Wales' railways
(Image: Marc White / WalesOnline )
We do not yet know how much of the £445m will be for the Core Valley Lines and how much the Department for Transport is committing for spending on the non-devolved rail network in Wales, which includes the South Wales mainline and the north Wales line.
The Treasury will also need to confirm whether as capital investment it will be assigned over a four year or three year period.
The announcement comes amid a major row over the lack of money coming into Wales as a consequence of major rail projects in England, like both HS2, which is costing over £60bn, and the East West Cambridge to Oxford line that is set to cost £6bn.
A Labour Westminster source told WalesOnline there had been a concerted lobbying effort from MPs to persuade the Treasury to invest in Wales. Individual MPs had been lobbying for specific projects in their constituencies, but the group of MPs had also met with chief secretary Darren Jones to give their wish list and explain why it was important.
Questions remain but this is a significant step - Sion Barry's analysis
The Welsh Government is responsible for the cost of maintenance, repair and renewal (OMR) of the Core Valley Lines, which also includes the Coryton Line and part of the City Line , both in Cardiff. The Welsh Government's £1bn electrification of the Core Valley Lines is close to completion.
So, what also needs to be clarified is what element of the direct funding for Core Valley Lines being allocated to the Welsh Government will be assigned to new rail enhancement projects, as opposed to any contribution to its OMR requirement.
Maintaining existing rail infrastructure is expensive with Network Rail having a budget of around £42bn for England and Wales over the current five year spending period, with around £2.2bn assigned for the non devolved rail infrastructure in Wales
Once the DfT commits to major projects, like the £16bn rail and bus investment in the Midlands and North of England last week, as they take more than three years to complete they will have to be funded for the long-term.
Barring projects being scaled back due to unforeseen cost overruns or delays, the new level of funding for rail projects in Wales should be maintained over several comprehensive spending review period - even if there is a change of government in Westminster.
Secretary of State for Wales Jo Stevens said that getting a fairer rail funding for Wales was her number one priority when taking up the cabinet role last summer. While questions remains on the split on the funding, and the level of rail enhancement investment on the Core Valley Lines, she has achieved what no other Welsh Secretary of State has been able to.
The advisory Wales Rail Board, which includes various stakeholders such as the Department for Transport (DfT), the Wales Office, Transport for Wales, and the Welsh Government, has already drawn up a detailed list of priority rail enhancement projects for Wales.
These come with a price tag of several billion pounds, including required investment to increase the number of trains per hour on the Coryton and City Lines to at least four an hour rather than the current two.
There is also the plan to build more stations on the south Wales mainline with the hope of reducing congestion on the M4. The so-called five Burns stations are Cardiff East (off Newport Road), Newport West, Maindy, Llanwern, and Magor.
In a phased investment programme, they will take around five years to complete.
The stations were recommended by the Burns Commission, chaired by Lord Burns and commissioned by the Welsh Government to explore ways to boost public transport investment in south-east Wales.
This followed former First Minister Mark Drakeford's 2017 decision not to proceed with a Labour Senedd manifesto pledge to deliver a £1bn M4 relief road south of Newport.
The stations, with a combined construction cost of £320m, first require £15m for detailed design work and £50m to upgrade the relief lines from Bristol Temple Meads to South Wales to allow for passenger services.
It will be a number of weeks before an announcement will be made on which rail projects in Wales will be able to commence following the comprehensive spending review settlement.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves will make the announcement after PMQs on Wednesday
(Image: PA )
Former Welsh Government deputy transport minister Lee Waters said: 'This is a big number for Wales and is more than the Welsh Government calculates it would have had from a fair share of the HS2 project.
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"Civil servants calculated that we lost out £431 in Barnett formula funding by the way the high-speed rail project was categorised by the Treasury. This £445 million makes good on that. "We will have to wait to see what exact schemes the Chancellor is agreeing to but that figure would allow the priority schemes that the Welsh Government and the UK Department of Transport had been working on to go ahead.
"We now need to make sure we get a change to how funding works for rail so that this is the beginning of a pipeline of investment into the future.'
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