Following on from my mini-rant last week, I finally managed to work with some of the data for spending on sustainable transport in the local authority areas of England outside of London between 2022 and 2025. Whilst the total amounts is always fun to see (more on that soon), how this is allocated across the country reflects the non-sensical nature of bidding centrally for government funding to do basic things.

For this post, you can download and play with the data yourself, as its all on this spreadsheet.

Let’s start with the totals for the 5 funds mentioned last week – Local Transport Plan Integrated Transport Block (ITB), City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement (CRSTS), Active Travel Fund (ATF), Levelling Up Fund (LUF), and Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) funding.

Of the £5.1 billion allocated between 2022 and 2025, 57% has been allocated by the CRSTS, 21% through BSIP, 11% through ITB, 8% through LUF, and 3% through ATF.

This indicates that the greatest allocations of funding is targetted towards the city regions, as CRSTS is allocated to only those regions. So let’s look at them in more detail. Of the regions, £748 million has been allocated to West Midlands, £616 million has been allocated to West Yorkshire, and £563 million to Greater Manchester.

For the city regions, the North of Tyne Combined Authority (essentially Newcastle and Northumberland, with a bit of North Tyneside to boot) on paper has not been allocated funding. But for reasons I outlined last week this funding has been allocated to the North East Combined Authority, with funding (especially ITB) being reallocated to the authorities via anopther mechanism.

The total funding seems reasonable. The city regions are the economic powerhouses of the country and have the greatest potential for modal shift, so it makes sense that sustainable transport investment is focussed in those areas. But when you start breaking the funding down is when it starts to get a bit strange.

It’s…strange. There is no clear link here between the economic performance of a place (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the West of England are bot high performing economic areas, but have received radically different funding allocations), a focus on levelling up (Greater Manchester and the North East do not get much funding per head compared to others, whilst Sheffield and Liverpool performa well, the former despite getting no BSIP funding), or any other policy initiative.

When you break down for non-city region, its even more non-sensical. Below are the top 10 local authorities in terms of spend per head.

In case you were wondering how on earth the Isles of Scilly have managed to get funding of over £20,000 per head, they had a £48 million LUF bid to improve their ferries to Penzance accepted. Combined with a population of just over 2000, it skews things a lot. But even looking at the rest, there are a mix of strong economic performers (Luton) and areas that need levelling up (e.g. Blackburn with Darwen). For completeness, below are the top 10 local authorities in terms of total spend.

Again, looking at this data – what is the story here? Is this there anything we can say here about how government is supporting the growth of cities, or levelling up deprived areas? Is this about climate change or modal shift? Can anything be said at all from this data?

My hypothesis is this. The only thing that can be said from this data is that there is a general policy direction towards investing in transport improvements in city regions, and then the remainder of the allocation of funding is dependant upon an authority’s strategic case for investment and its skill in bidding. Simply, if authorities have a good policy and a good basic direction in place, and people in place who can write good bids, they will get funding.

This to me is a non-sensical way to invest in transport improvements. Such investment needs to be done systemically, consistently, and with clear policy objectives in mind and funding linked to said objectives. This analysis, which is still preliminary, shows that the UK does the complete opposite.

It’s mad…isn’t it?