blog: Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before…
Monday 17th October 2022
... Roads for Prosperity, or the Road to Nowhere? ITP’s Managing Director, Neil Taylor, reflects on the latest UK Government transport funding announcements.
Stop me if you think
you’ve heard this one before
As the UK prepares to welcome its latest new Prime Minister and cabinet of ministers (again!), a raft of policy announcements, investments and initiatives have been making their way into news headlines over recent weeks.
While the focus, inevitably, is on stimulating economic growth and creating opportunities; some of the associated transport investments appear unduly car-focused. Indeed, around two-thirds of the infrastructure schemes announced by Government in autumn 2022 involve constructing new roads.
Although most of these are not
actually new projects, just existing ones being accelerated through the
business case process, it is hard not to be left feeling there is a renewed
belief in Government that new roads lead to growth.
Let’s do the timewarp again
This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, given most new governments of all political persuasions have resorted to domestic construction projects, and particularly road building, whenever the economic outlook starts looking a little bleak. Building roads (and especially tunnels, it seems) secures jobs, reduces journey times (eventually… albeit temporarily in most cases), and generally helps us continue to move the bulk of all goods transported around the UK, to and from ports and airports - largely due to past cycles of road infrastructure investments.
As usual there are lessons from the not-so-distant past as to what might happen next. The Thatcher Government’s Roads for Prosperity White Paper (1989) sought to position the UK to capitalise on the car-based economy it could foresee. It linked expansion of the U.K.’s motorway network with interventions like enterprise zones, which provided tax incentives that helped some car manufacturers decide to locate their assembly plants here in the UK.
However, within 10 years most of the proposed projects had been set aside, or were subsequently delivered over the course of a much longer timeframe. Fast-forward 30 years and government was busily finalising its Road to Zero Strategy aimed at reducing carbon emissions from road transport, which some might consider a tacit omission that more roads built in the past led as certainly towards increased carbon emissions, as they did prosperity.
Isn't it ironic?
All of which leads me towards my point. At a time when many people are struggling to afford to fuel their cars and heat their homes (rather as they were in the early 1990’s), the idea of building more roads to enable “growth” seems a little too ironic.
Worth remembering, this is all playing out against a context in which public transport operators continue to receive additional subsidy payments to ensure they can maintain basic bus, tram and heavy rail services while the world finds a new equilibrium following the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, many households are struggling financially, with the prospect of an economic slowdown combined with cost-driven inflation largely resulting from constrained and expensive imported energy supplies.
Thirdly, there is the carbon issue. Irrespective of how quickly the country can decarbonise its automotive dependence, a growing weight of academic evidence forecasts the need to encourage more people to walk, cycle and use public transport if we are to achieve net zero carbon targets by 2050. They also point out:
“In the case of roads, the emissions from construction are unlikely to be paid back by operational improvements. In some cases, increased use of the road will also worsen the emissions burden.”
Everything Counts (2022) Marsden, Lokesh and Densley-Tingley
Everything’s not lost
So, if recent history is anything to go by, a forthcoming spending review is as likely to introduce a need to cut some of the schemes from the budget as it is to make other recommendations to balance the public finances. However, the distant past also suggests most of the road building projects currently being proposed are likely to be constructed in my lifetime unless we change lanes on transport spending.
It is important to point out that active travel infrastructure - to enable more people to walk and cycle - and public transport investments are more likely to make a positive long-term difference to the journeys that most people who live in urban areas of the UK make regularly. Many of these trips cannot be switched to working from home, or directly helped by adding more highway capacity, but do facilitate the goods and services the country relies upon being traded, and which are likely to continue to provide the basic foundations of any future growth for many years to come.
Noting that the adopted UK plan for Decarbonising Transport, published in 2021, aims for half of all journeys in towns and cities to be cycled or walked by 2030; it feels like shifting the balance of funding in favour of the mode shares we want to achieve would truly be a ‘level up’ manoeuvre. It leads me to wonder… why not spend 50% of the transport budget on active travel infrastructure and see what happens?
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