What a difference a word makes
What a difference a single word makes!
My kids love spot-the-the difference games, so here’s one for you to join in with at home.
1 The original announcement of the Union Connectivity Review on 30th June 2020:
The Government will work with devolved administrations to carry out a ‘connectivity review’, looking at how best to improve road, rail, air and sea links between our 4 nations.
2 The published terms of reference on 3rd October 2020:
This work should cover transport connectivity between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland via road, rail and air, and across the Irish Sea
3 The Exec Summary of the interim report, published on Wednesday:
This Review is an opportunity to assess current transport connectivity within and between the nations of the UK and to make recommendations that will maximise economic potential and improve quality of life.
Have you spotted it yet?
Here’s another one for you: the third para of the report, describing its overall purpose:
The Union Connectivity Review will assess transport connections and networks in, and between, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland
The crucial difference is the use of the word within (or in, in the second example).
As per my previous (somewhat critical!) article about the Union Connectivity Review, the published Terms of Reference could only lead to unwanted vanity projects for Boris Johnson. Indeed, it was widely rumoured that the thing was a figleaf to enable Boris to build a bridge to Northern Ireland.
Sir Peter acknowledges he was “asked specifically” to look into a fixed link to Northern Ireland but then shunts it into a separate review headed by Professor Doug Oakervee. I imagine he’s delighted to get that poisoned chalice off his desk!
“…within…”
The addition of those crucial words ‘and within’ may be the most important feature of the entire report published on Wednesday. Having reframed the task he’s been given, Sir Peter is intent on using the report as a chance to lay out a framework for a national multi-modal UK Strategic Transport Network. This seems sensible. Indeed, it comes into that category of inventions that surprise you with the realisation that it doesn’t already exist.
Once we know that’s what Sir Peter’s intending to do with the final report, a lot of the rest of the interim report matters less. He spends pages analysing all the various internal border crossings and listing all the cross-border links that are areas of “concern”. There is, though, no promise to do anything about any of these areas of concern beyond each being “reviewed in my final report”. Indeed, rather gloriously, Sir Peter has managed to make “the Union” just one of four criteria that he will apply in his RAG criteria to create his recommendations.
Given the original terms of reference were entirely about travel between the UK nations, it will be interesting to see the shape of the final network that Sir Peter defines. I suspect that it will include places like Felixstowe, Dover, Southampton and Leeds which see very low levels of cross-border travel but very high levels of strategically important travel. If so, Sir Peter will have done a great job in converting Boris’s potentially wasteful and distracting brief into a useful piece of transport planning.
However, there are a number of worries.
Well, it’s one way of making alternatives to car more affordable…
The report goes out of its way to highlight the low levels of emissions from aviation and it has been reported by papers as diverse as The Sun and the Financial Times that a cut in Air Passenger Duty will be recommended. This would be catastrophic to the UK’s global leadership on climate change in the very month that we host COP26.
Moreover, if the review is going to get into the questions of tax and spend (which, quite frankly, it should) then cutting APD is not the right area of focus. In the month that the Government froze duty for the 10th consecutive time (while, again, increasing rail fares), it’s absolutely critical that Sir Peter uses this report as the opportunity for tax policy to become a tool to incentivise greener, efficient travel choices. As per this post, this is absolutely aligned with the levelling up agenda as poorer, rural areas are heavily impacted by the current fuel duty regime compared to richer folk in cities making shorter journeys.
If a multimodal UK Transport Network doesn’t look at realigning the tax and spend policies of the different modes, it’s not a multimodal transport network but several economically disconnected networks (as they are today).
Overall, though, the early conclusions hint at a report that it dodges the bullet of Boris’s vanity and, instead, seeks to generate some useful outputs.
Government corruption
There is just one final thing I’ll draw your attention to: the fact Sir Peter does not use the Government’s new Levelling Up Priority classifications. In his interim report, he sets himself the task of identifying the areas that require levelling up, and determines to use the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (the long-standing gold-standard dataset for understanding poverty) plus GDP per capita, productivity and unemployment.
But given that the Government has already done the hard work with its Levelling Up Priorities, why does he feel the need to start again?
Perhaps because the Levelling Up Priorities are a dataset with no published criteria (at all!), which have been used to disburse the Levelling Up Fund and which have channelled funding into some remarkable places. Rishi Sunak’s constituency of Richmondshire is one of the most affluent in the country. Yet the Levelling Up Priorities believe it is Priority 1 and in need of cash.
Lewes, in Sussex, is an affluent town in the home counties with low levels of deprivation - but, unusually for the commuter belt, is also a marginal constituency (it was Norman Baker’s seat until 2015). Yes, Lewes is Priority 1.
Interestingly, Lewes is the 194th most deprived place in the UK according to the Indices of Deprivation (for which robust methodologies exist). But if you look at the 193rd most deprived place in the UK, it is Exeter - which has the lowest level of Levelling Up Priority.
Frankly, it is corrupt. And I know “corrupt” is a strong word, but how else can you characterise a formula for which the Government has published no methodology and which results in taxpayers’ cash being channelled to Government-held marginal constituencies - and the constituency of the Chancellor himself.
So, given Sir Peter was given the option by this Government of approving a Prime Minister’s vanity project while using biased data to throw bungs at marginal constituencies, it seems like he’s done a pretty good job at just being a transport planner.
Will be fascinating to see the next report.
