Many of England’s local authorities stand to lose or gain millions of pounds in transport funding under a new formula launched by the Government last week.
The method for splitting the annual £500M-plus integrated transport block will be phased in from next year.
While phasing softens the year-to-year impact on allocations, there will be clear winners and losers by the end of the five-year local transport plan cycle, Department for Transport figures show.
Kent, Cornwall and Tyne & Wear are in for some of the greatest gains, whereas unitaries, such as Reading and York, face the heaviest cuts, with Merseyside emerging as the sole loser among the mets.
The formula for funding non-major schemes was set out in a consultation paper by local transport minister Karen Buck last week. It is based on five ‘shared transport priorities’ of central and local government, as broadly agreed by a working group earlier this year (Surveyor, 10 February).
Its public transport usage component favours urban areas, as does the formula’s reliance on population figures as a proxy for congestion. Larger urban areas get more per head where population exceeds 100,000, and a small uplift at the 50,000 threshold. Localities with air quality-management areas also get extra.
The formula gives the priorities similar weightings, with 30% each for public transport and congestion/pollution, and 20% each for road safety and accessibility. Growth areas for housing will share an annual £7M top-up, and 25% of the total block will be held back to reward excellence among authorities ‘with good track records, strong plans and higher ambitions’.
Whitehall officials wanted a ‘fair and transparent’ formula that better reflected the congestion challenge facing dense urban areas.
Counties fought a simple population-based carve-up, with funds haemorrhaging from rural to urban areas.
‘There isn’t a significant shift one way or the other,’ said Brian Smith, who represented the County Surveyors’ Society on the working group. ‘But some authorities are going to feel the pain quite considerably.’
The current distribution was ‘a bit quirky and reflected the vagaries of the past’, such as success with ‘package bids’ in the mid-1990s, he said. As a result there was ‘a double-whammy’ effect with some of the higher-performers losing more.
There was broad agreement on the formula’s ‘technical underpinning’. The problem was that overall funding for integrated transport was inadequate.
The DfT seeks views by 12 October.
Financial planning guidelines for LTPs. www.dft.gov.uk
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