It is such a simple question on the face of it: how much does the UK spend on sustainable transport? We should know this, right? A simple figure?
That’s what I thought until this week, where for this post I set myself a simple task: calculate how much the UK spends on sustainable transport. For this week, my goal was to find out how much do local authorities in England outside of London spend on walking, cycling, buses, trains, and other sustainable transport infrastructure. I even made it easier for myself, by just focussing on a few funds for the period 2022-25:
Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP)
I did the calculations. You can download them on the spreadsheet here. But this is not about showing the results of this analysis. This is about how our system of funding transport in the UK is fundamentally broken and needs urgent reform.
Let’s start with the obvious. These are just 5 of the funds that local authorities can bid for to improve transport in their area. Well, 4 actually, as ITB is allocated annually to local authorities and combined authorities based on a formula, but its only about 11% of the total funding allocated to sustainable transport over the coming 3 years.
Each of the remainder must be bid for, to the Department for Transport, by local authorities. They must be reported on to the Department for Transport by local authorities and combined authorities. Of these, CRSTS is the biggest one in town, at over £2.9bn in funding. What’s more, with the exception of Levelling Up, each of these involved at least two rounds of bidding to pre-qualify and to finalise.
By my calculations, for authorities that were successful and bid for everything, that is 6 bidding rounds so far (x2 for CRSTS, x2 for ATF, x1 for Levelling Up, and x1 for BSIP) with another round (BSIP) still ongoing. For those unsuccessful with the first round of Levelling Up, a second round has just kicked off.
That’s…a lot of wasted time just to get simple improvements to transport infrastructure. Improvements that are needed. I’d rather that time not be spent bidding, but instead just be allocated to local authorities and be done with it. And I’m sure that civil servants don’t want to waste any more time assessing bids.
The next problem is best shown by the Combined Authorities. The English way of doing governance is through compromise. Why do wholesale changes to make governance consistent and workable, when we can just make changes that are flexible? For that, read dependant upon political relationships at regional levels that determine how much power each authority wants to give up, and so powers are inconsistent and dependant upon local negotiation and compromise.
This leads to funding arrangements that are frankl farcical. Take, for instance, the North of Tyne Combined Authority and North East Combined Authority. The North of Tyne Combined Authority was created when Newcastle, North of Tyne, and Northumberland broke away from the North East Combined Authority to create their own. If you look at the funding allocation, you would think that’s a bad deal as these authorities now have no transport funding.
Not quite. Because both authorities collaborate closely on transport matters, as so government decided that joint funding allocations on BSIP and CRSTS would be allocated to the North East Combined Authority, but will include the allocations to North of Tyne authorities in this.
Just…why?
More generally across the Combined Authorities, you may be forgiven for thinking that the Combined Authorities are swimming in money and the local councils are not. Take the examples of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and Greater Manchester, just for starters. The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority has been allocated £13.9m in ITB funding and £1.7m ATF funding. While the Greater Manchester Combined Authority has been allocated £451.8m in CRSTS funding, and £15.9m ATF funding.
The reality is that the combined authorities have simply been allocated this funding. The spending authority is often the local councils who deliver the infrastructure improvements. So the Combined Authorities are often just co-ordinators of this work.
Oh, in case you wondered why the Sheffield City Region’s CRSTS allocation is the same of that of the Liverpool City Region, it seems they got the same funding letter. I will change the figures once the right letter is uploaded.
Finally, there is no detail anywhere on the government’s website about who got what BSIP funding. I had to go to a trade publication to find that data.
I could go into how difficult it was to identify whether Levelling Up Funding was in fact transport investment (this involved some digging), and how funding is translated into longer term programmes of spend (it isn’t), but you get the point.
You often know something isn’t right when a simple question that should have a simple answer doesn’t have one. The principle of good public service demands that spending is transparent and accountable, and regular funding bids to isolated pots of funding does not achieve this.
If you want to analyse the data yourself, go ahead and be my guest. But we should be better than this.
Mobility Matters 