Why invest in local transport? This is the question reverberating down the corridors of Whitehall and town halls alike, as a general election debate on the value of current public expenditure kicks off.
The Department for Transport (DfT) is assembling evidence of the benefits of increased investment in local transport over the past decade for the ‘public value programme’ the Treasury launched in 2008, but extended in the April Budget.
The ‘demanding public value reviews’ now being conducted across Whitehall departments are looking for evidence to demonstrate the case for their spending aspirations for the future.
A question for the DfT’s regional and local transport team is grappling with is ‘what has been delivered with the significant increase in expenditure over the past decade?’ Surveyor welcomes the opportunity for the value of local transport to be demonstrated, and so is this week launching a campaign to rally the industry to show those in power that ‘Local Transport Works’.
This is not asking for more money, but ensuring that available funding is effectively targeted at beneficial schemes. Senior council officials have often been slow to make this case.
The money for local transport plans overall, including for integrated transport schemes to improve facilities for public transport, walking and cycling doubled in 2001/02, to £1.3bn, and this was followed by annual above-inflation rises for three years.
But funding was effectively frozen by the-then chancellor, Gordon Brown, in 2004, and most of the ‘increases’ announced in 2007 for the period up to 2010/11 were provided as supported borrowing. Senior council officials said their local transport plans would effectively have to be ‘ripped up’.
How funding is allocated is a political decision. These decisions are, however, always made in the context of the available evidence, and evidence on the benefits of investing in local transport has not often been forthcoming.
The CSS (County Surveyors’ Society) admitted on the eve of the 2007 spending review that practitioners did not have the knowledge of the funds needed to clear the road repairs backlog. Calls for maintenance to be included in a ‘fiscal stimulus’ in the April Budget were apparently unsupported by evidence, and went unheeded.
And Cycling England said recently that there had been under-investment in cycling because the wider economic benefits were poorly understood.
In short, the industry needed to get a handle on the benefits of local transport. Where it is suggested that investing in a certain local transport project would create jobs, is there the evidence for this? Are there simple ways of taking into account the value of changing travel behaviour?
Surveyor accepts that there is an appetite to cut out bureaucracy, but we want to encourage monitoring the impact of schemes.
As SQW Consulting told DfT civil servants at a seminar last week, ‘if you have the data, it becomes much, much easier for everyone to make the case in future’.
• Next week: Can local transport increase employment?
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