Is Transport for the North Doomed?
Transport… for the North
OK, so sometimes in this blog, I’ll start with a question and it’s totally obvious that I’ve already answered it in my own mind.
A few months ago, when I asked Are Part-Time Season Tickets An Unnecessary Bung For The Already Rich?, I think you probably sensed that I thought they were.
But on this one, I really don’t know what I think and would love to hear the views of people who know more about it than I do.
I’ve spent all of my career in the Midlands (Derby briefly, Shrewsbury for a year, Birmingham for six years) and London. I’ve never worked in the north. My wife’s a Scouser and my brother-in-law lives in Manchester; but I’m not sure that makes me an expert.
I’m writing today’s post from Liverpool, having travelled up for a few days to visit the in-laws (well, their garden, at any rate).
But I have this niggle about Transport for the North that I’d like to share.
My niggle is that ‘the North’ just isn’t the right size for a regional transport authority.
For any transport authority, there’s a balance. In general, decisions should be made by people closest to the customer. But some decisions, especially on railways, need to be made at a higher level. What level, precisely?
“The North”, as defined by TfN, is a large area encompassing two of Britain’s four largest cities, and some of the most rural and isolated communities in England. How much do Halewood and Hexham really have in common? Certainly, do they have anything in common beyond things that everywhere has in common with everywhere else anyway…
How do the Germans do it?
Is this whole article just an excuse to have a picture of a train dangling from a crazy metal arch?
An interesting comparison is North Rhine-Westphalia. This is the German state containing big cities such as Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Wuppertal (the latter is not that big, actually. But it has trains that hang from the sky, so it must be counted).
Overall, North Rhine-Westphalia has 17.9 million people and covers 13,000 square miles. This is pretty similar to the North’s 14.9 million people in 14,000 square miles.
Because of its history (formed in the mid-nineteenth century as a union of hundreds of tiny monarchies), Germany has very powerful states. These states are responsible for their own transport decisions, with the states ‘buying’ the services they want from Deutsche Bahn (or, sometimes, other providers like National Express and Go Ahead). So you’d expect North Rhine-Westphalia to be a powerhouse for transport decision making in Germany.
But, actually, North Rhine-Westphalia is one of only a handful of states to have devolved its powers downwards. Now that's really interesting. Germany is a federated country (i.e. power, by default, rests with the states, just as in the UK power, by default, rests at the centre). But their one state that is equivalent in size and population to the North decided that it was the wrong size for transport decision-making.
Instead, the true powerhouse is the Rhine-Ruhr region, covering just the major cities. Rhine-Ruhr is the level at which, for example, decisions on rail services are taken.
Now that’s interesting as well. Rhine-Ruhr includes 10 million people in 3,000 square miles. By comparison, the total of the Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield city regions is almost exactly 10 million people in 5,000 square miles.
So instead of Transport for the North, should we have Transport for the Northern Cities?
That would be an almost exact equivalent to Rhine-Ruhr, which seems (from my position of comparative ignorance) to be working well.
Do people believe in TfN?
TfN is very self-consciously modelled on Transport for London. That’s why we have the rather clumsy “Transport for…” construction. TfL only ended up with it because in 2000 there was a need to distinguish between Transport for London (run by the Mayor; in the process of being set up) and London Transport (run by the Government; in the process of being wound down). If it weren’t for the desire to look like TfL, which was seen to be successful, TfN would have been called Northern Transport (shorter, easier to say).
But London is a single entity with pretty clear borders. People know what it is, and where it stops. Even when the Mayor of London makes a determined effort to avoid controversy (as per today’s), they are still a national figure.
None of these is true of “the North”.
When, last year, the centralising tendencies of the Government attempted a power grab from both TfL and TfN, TfL’s fightback was national news. Whereas the creation of a “Northern Transport Acceleration Council” under Grant Shapps’ chairmanship was ignored. Yet surely the entire purpose of TfN is to accelerate Northern transport. If such a council is to be established, the one person who shouldn't be chairing it is Grant Shapps.
Do people believe in Rhine-Ruhr?
Rhine-Ruhr as a region has a strong political identity. It is widely agreed to be the third-largest urban area in Europe after Paris and London. But it isn’t London: ask someone from Cologne or Dortmund where they live, and they will tell you they live in Cologne or Dortmund. Rhine-Ruhr is an artificial construct to maximise the economic potential of adjacent cities, and one that generates pride only in so far as it works - and there is pride in it working.
Could a Northern Cities collective of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield be the equivalent?
Where should power lie?
A posh bus in Manchester City Region
Someone needs to set the timetables. That person should be as close as possible to the people that will use the service. For buses, that undoubtedly means at a town or city level. But, trains are more complex, where different networks impact on each other. So should this be a level above the city? For big, adjacent cities, probably. If so, does it make sense that the level above Liverpool automatically includes Lancaster, though not Leicester?
Make it work
Changing structures is generally not a good idea. I’ll come back to this repeatedly in this blog. So we shouldn’t change TfN for the sake of change. But if TfN is going to get beyond a rather shaky start, it has to have a purpose. My niggle is that its patch is too big to work, too distant to be loved and that power will therefore leak upwards back to Westminster.
