Oxfordshire County Council leader Ian Hudspeth launched the county’s long term vision for transport infrastructure at the beginning of April this year.
The Connecting Oxfordshire ‘vision’ is based on £800m of planned investment by Network Rail, the Highways Agency and the council in coming years, but goes further in its thinking.
Around 85,000 new jobs and 100,000 new homes are expected in the county by 2031, for which a lot of new transport capacity will be needed. A ‘City Deal’ partnership has been signed between Oxford’s city and county councils, Local Enterprise Partnerships and the Government, designed to lever in £1.1bn of private sector investment and focused on transport, skills and housing.
Existing schemes planned for the county include elctrification of Oxford’s main rail connection to London with additional stations and upgrades, plus a programme of road and junction improvements. This will not be enough, however, according to the county council. Its vision is very light on detail, but suggests a new mass transit system for Oxford and a possible monorail connecting the county’s main connurbations.
Speaking at the launch, Mr Hudspeth said: ‘Connecting Oxfordshire is our vision for transport across the county to 2020 and beyond. Oxfordshire is growing and thriving. We need to think about the vision for the future. As a transport authority we are throwing out the challenge for people to debate with us how we can realise this vision.’
Oxford on the move: A long-term vision of better transport
Jon Masters finds out how Oxford's transport vision is being managed alongside a period of cuts and other priorities including improving community transport and long-term infrastructure.
Local authorities’ transport services are potentially more vulnerable than some other services as councils are forced to look long and hard at what can be afforded. Cuts in funding inevitably lead to tough decisions on priorities – what is essential and what has to bear the brunt of the spending cuts.
Transport has its place in this pecking order. In Oxfordshire, the county council is targeting a reduction in costs while maintaining the same overall level of service via a new cross-council STP.
The county has made a number of key decisions in developing its STP initiative-several follow examples elsewhere. Oxfordshire’s deputy director commercial Mark Kemp is the first to acknowledge that much of what the STP involves has already been done elsewhere.
‘We’re not afraid of taking other people’s ideas and pulling them together,’ Mr Kemp says. Moreover, despite being motivated by a cut in funds, Oxfordshire’s STP promises to produce some positive changes to the way transport services are provided in the county.
The main organisational change behind the STP brings all transport services of different departments together under a common governance structure and a single funding allocation of £30m per year for the next four years.
The deputy directors of all of Oxfordshire’s directorates sit on an overarching project board. Transport support is being managed as a single entity across the council.
‘We can now take advantage of this structure. If a saving can be made in education transport, we are better able to use that money saved to make an investment that brings lower costs in another area,’ says Mr Kemp.
‘This was previously very difficult to do because everybody was concentrating on their parts of the business and funds could not easily be transferred across. Now we can work as a board to prevent changes in the services of one directorate from producing harmful knock-on effects or a need to add transport support in another area,’ he adds.
As deputy director commercial within Oxfordshire’s environment and economy directorate, Mr Kemp is the man that looks after all of the county’s transport support contracts. He also chairs the STP board. He has been tasked with reducing funds needed for supported transport by 15% over four years, while minimising the impact on accessibility to transport.
‘In terms of the financing, the way we have worked it, we have back loaded the savings to make them at the end of the programme.
‘The idea is that we work on the programme and as we make reductions in spending we will use that money as ‘invest to save’ to introduce new measures that will make savings for us later on,’ he says.
‘For example, if we make savings as we are likely to do in tendered bus services, by rationalising our network, that money we will look to reinvest into some development around community transport.’
Other authorities have used similar tactics but commonly look to make savings to individual departments’ transport services. Oxfordshire has decided to look to make savings ‘across the whole thing,’ Mr Kemp says.
‘The way we started out was to get Oxford University’s Transport Studies Group to study rural accessibility across the county. This was partly to get more information and partly because we felt it was important to get external credibility behind some of the things we have been presenting to council officers and members.’
One or two of the suggestions from the University made good sense, but are not legislatively possible at present.
With regard to concessionary fares, Oxfordshire has its fare share of wealthy elderly people willing to give up their entitlement and hand it to a younger person. While this can’t be supported or promoted by the council, there is a number of things that it can do, such as set up a Wheels 2 Work scheme to help people get to education and training.
‘Where our clients are mostly vulnerable people, the young and the elderly, the aim is to funnel their needs through a customer service arrangement,’ Mr Kemp says. Oxfordshire already has a customer service centre. But additional staff are to be hired and trained to create a transport ‘Hub’ specifically for assessing individual needs and directing people to the right service.
‘Essentially, we want to squeeze the areas where we are directly contracting and to direct and support people onto public services instead.
‘Some of the issues of the STP are around changing elligibility rules and then supporting those that fall outside the new thresholds, while others are about helping young people by teaching them how to use public transport. We are bringing someone in this year to take on this training role,’ says Mr Kemp.
A big part of the challenge for Oxfordshire is developing and promoting community transport. The county is not as blessed as others with community run transport, although it does have some strong schemes in places, he says.
‘Part of the STP will be about determining where the gaps are and investigating what we can do to allow this sort of activity to develop,’ he adds.
There is a demographic of relatively well-off and often retired people willing to help. So, as the council has already found with the running of youth centres, it may need to take a step back and let communities take over. ‘To an extent we just need to let people know about any void in services in their locality. The philosophy of t
