“The Department for Transport is developing a strategy which will set the high-level direction for how transport should be designed, built and operated in England over the next 10 years.”
(Image from Unite Ayrshire – public transport for everyone!)
- See the consultation landing page here
- See the Transport Secretary’s speech here
- See the Transport Secretary’s written statement to Parliament here
“Anything major?”
One thing is.
Regional Roadshow coming to a city near you!
“[The consultation] will be followed by a series of regional roadshows early next year – so we can hear directly from local leaders, transport operators, passenger bodies and local people. And once ready, the strategy will be delivered by a new Integrated Transport Commissioner, who I will be recruiting soon.“
Rt Hon. Lou Haigh MP – Secretary of State for Transport, Leeds, 28 Nov 2024
“I visited Dijon earlier this year; a city with 164,000 residents, roughly the size of Chester. Its fully integrated transport network is reliable, efficient and effective. And they built it, essentially, from scratch.”
The Transport Secretary trailed her speech with a social media post citing Dijon, which I highlighted in this earlier blogpost.
“Dijon is a city about the size of Chester and so a comparison is begged. Where Dijon is attracting more and more of its residents to public transport, Chester has seen bus usage fall by over 14%. Why does Dijon’s transport system work whilst Chester’s has not? It’s because in Dijon the city has the power to make the changes it needs.”
Some of you will have noted the similarities in size between Cambridge now (3 years after the 2021 census recorded over 145,000 residents) and Dijon – also mindful of the ambitions the Housing Minister has for our city. Hence transport cannot be viewed or dealt with in isolation.
“Our integrated strategy will empower local leaders to design and build their own, region-specific networks.”
Define ‘Region’
That’s going to be one point of contention. Anything that squishes Cambridge with Peterborough, while cutting both cities off from market towns over the county border (For Peterborough this includes Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, for Cambridge this includes Newmarket, Haverhill, Saffron Walden, and Royston), will be unsatisfactory. I hope that the Devolution White Paper takes the bold step of creating a structure that makes good on the better parts of Redcliffe-Maud’s proposals – in Cambridge’s case incorporating much of the existing ‘travel to work’ area and to build a transport network within it.
For those of you interested, Redcliffe-Maud’s report (which has its own WikiPage here) can be seen as follows:
- The summary
- The main report
- The maps to the main report
- The research appendices
- The maps to the research appendices
“Is there a risk of a consultants’ bonanza?”
Possibly – which is why I hope some of the leading combined authorities and councils will choose to expand their in-house capacity rather than farming everything out to the private sector.
“[The Government’s plans] will then empower local leaders to design their local transport to meets specific local needs and address problems and pinch points in their areas…And today, I’m backing our Mayors across the country even further…By confirming that they will be given a statutory role in governing, the managing, the planning and developing of Great British Railways network.“
***Now this could be fun!***
Not least because of the trouble that combined authority mayors have had trying to get Network Rail to co-operate with them. Note Lou Haigh went even further in dealing with the Network Rail problem – she’s abolishing the institution altogether, in order to create a new one: Great British Railways. What will need to be scrutinised in detail by Parliament is how the governance structures function – in particular the relationship between GBR and Combined Authority Mayors. One particular potential bottleneck is on capacity. With limited resources – in particular skilled workers, what happens if the demand to improve/upgrade/build new lines and transport corridors exceeds the capacity of the industry? This is where ministers will have to work very closely with policy-makers in the Department for Education (especially on lifelong learning) to get enough potential new entrants trained up and active in building the new infrastructure.
Want to talk about rail-based public transport in/around Cambridge?
Of course you do!
Rail Future East has their Cambridge Meeting coming up on 7th December at 2:30pm at The Clayton Hotel on Station Road – ***Note the change of venue!***
See Rail Future East here for more details. I’ve added it as a FB event here.
Furthermore, the latest edition of Rail Future East tears into the Greater Cambridge Partnership over its failure to back Rail Haverhill (despite nearly a decade of lobbying)
Have a read of Peter Wakefield’s article here from p16 – and note that Rail Future East intend to challenge the application to the Transport Secretary for a ‘halfway-house road-for-buses’ option [i.e. CSET] that both Mr Wakefield and I tabled a number of public questions to the GCP in recent months.
And finally…
I expect the Devolution White Paper to be published on Monday 02 December 2024 as the Deputy Prime Minister and her minsters will be at their monthly slot in the Commons taking questions from MPs. It makes sense from a ministerial and parliamentary perspective to have the statement and the questions that follow from it straight after. Expect publication in mid-afternoon/early evening.
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
- Follow me on BSky <- A critical mass of public policy people seem to have moved here (and we could do with more local Cambridge/Cambs people on there!)
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
Below – Back on Track (2024) by Create Streets / Britain Remade – noting one of the representatives of Create Streets, who are going big on trams, is on this new expert panel announced by the Department for Transport. See the list of names here
The Cambridge Town Owl 