Transport is missing clear objectives, more than needing a strategy

DISCUSSION about the need for a clearer national statement about transport policy appears to be gathering pace, a development propelled both by the Transport Select Committee’s new inquiry into Strategic Transport Objectives and a Policy Position Statement just published by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) regarding the desirability of a national transport strategy for England.

The issue now on the table relates principally to the absence of a national policy for England, as Scotland and Wales have each already developed national transport strategies. There are, of course, also regional transport strategies developed by some of England’s seven Subnational Transport Bodies (STBs) and by Transport for London (TfL). And most of England’s local authorities with transport responsibilities have strategies of some kind, and are now working on new Local Transport Plans (LTPs), although with the frustration of not yet having received the guidance about them as long promised by the DfT.

There are also a significant number of further modal, issue-specific or transport-relevant strategies from other bodies, including the Integrated Rail Plan for the North and Midlands; the National Highways and Network Rail Control Period plans and route strategies; the Bus Back Better and the Cycling and Walking Investment Strategies; the Future of Freight Long-Term Plan, not to mention the Levelling up Strategy which has quite a lot to say about transport. And of course, the plans for achieving net zero in transport, which the ICE still refers to as a specific Transport Decarbonisation Plan, though that was soon withdrawn after legal challenge in July 2021 and has latterly re-emerged as part of a revision to the whole of government Net Zero Strategy – the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP), including a new carbon reduction pathway for transport.

The very existence of all these documents is both a help and a problem in shaping transport policy. Whilst they may guide individual sectors and areas of activity, they do not all dovetail and harmonise, and there is no supervision of what should happen when conflicts and different priorities emerge. One of the most fundamental of those is the economic growth imperative at the heart of England’s approach to planning for road provision as embodied in thinking and assessment shared by both the Department for Transport and National Highways.

In the current fragmented system of responsibilities and strategies it is difficult to ensure transport planning is directed towards overall outcomes that address the right fundamental general economic, social and environmental objectives. As the ICE report points out, there is no current means of assessing whether the resources provided to different modes, projects and regions are appropriate against wider aspirations for what the network needs to deliver, and indeed how all the different elements get the appropriate resources and are robust against the climate emergency, resilient against potential other disruptive forces, and regularly reviewed as social, economic and technological change rapidly occurs.

In the view of the ICE, the strategy should both set policy and clarify the roles and responsibilities required of key stakeholders to deliver its overarching vision. Bodies responsible for delivery need to be appropriately empowered and supported with long-term funding settlements, it says. Central government should be accountable for identifying outcomes, policy formulation, funding allocation and legislation/regulation. The Department for Transport (DfT) should own the strategy. National agencies and Subnational Transport Bodies should inform the strategy, and have the appropriate powers and resources to develop and deliver projects within their remit based on the overarching principles and within agreed constraints. The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) should also have a continuing role advising the government about specific infrastructure requirements, says ICE. 

Transport is a means to an end, not an end in itself, the ICE statement usefully reminds us. A national transport strategy for England, therefore, needs to be vision led it acknowledges. It should not be weighed down by technical details or become a wish-list of projects. It should set out the context, ambition and core elements needed to develop and deliver subsidiary modal and regional plans.

All of that is a very big ask.

To play a worthwhile role a national transport strategy or policy statement should take a more holistic view than any of the individual existing strategies, thus helping address the conflicting economic, environmental and social outcomes the country hopes to achieve, and the role of transport in meeting (or inhibiting) them. A welcome discussion on that issue would parallel what Wales did in linking its transport strategy to its seven national well-being goals, and in recognising the needs of both current and future generations. It would mean the conversation should not be just about meeting mobility requirements and their infrastructure needs, but about the broader policy context that transport should be reflecting to achieve that wider vision. 

Any modern transport strategy has to be informed about how much travel demand can sensibly be provided for within a sustainable system, and aspirational about how to achieve the behavioural changes which will lead to people choosing more sustainable options — or simply making less trips, or shorter ones.

A national transport strategy is an opportunity to accelerate the shift from a ‘predict and provide’ (forecast-led) approach to a vision-led approach to transport planning, the ICE points out. Vision-led planning ‘sets out a preferred future and charts a course towards it that allows for uncertainty’, according to the Institution’s new position paper. ‘It is a means of rethinking how people and freight will travel when policy steers movement in more sustainable and equitable directions’. 

Embedding such an approach within a national transport strategy could help deliver the transition from a car-centric vision to one that is both sustainable, modally agnostic, and broad in its intentions. Indeed, vision-led planning provides the freedom for those in transport to take a much wider view than just focusing on travel, transport and even mobility needs, to recognising that enabling access to opportunities can also be achieved by spatial proximity and digital connectivity.

Indeed, any modern transport strategy has to be informed about how much travel demand can sensibly be provided for within a sustainable system, and aspirational about how to achieve the behavioural changes which will lead to people choosing more sustainable options — or simply making less trips, or shorter ones. 

The Scottish and Welsh transport policies are more all-embracing and clear in their overriding objectives. Each have agreed targets to reduce motorised transport levels, but England as yet has not grasped that nettle nationally, though some local authorities and regional bodies have begun to, and similarly adopt a clear hierarchy of transport modes, with sustainable modes at the top. This has been instrumental in Welsh decision-making, such as the decision to cancel, postpone or scale back all major road-building projects in Wales.

Embracing such thinking in England would also surely require a supporting significant review of the principles of appraisal and decision-making, as in Wales. This has meant attaching much more weight to the balance of whole-life economic, environmental and social benefits - and costs - of projects, and allowing for transport planning to be aspirational about behaviour change and shaping sustainable travel patterns. And likewise, much more carefully aligned with other key infrastructure sectors, particularly energy and digital, and land use planning, to maximise efficiencies and wider benefits. 

Keeping a strategy high level and integrating it with long-term national priorities such as net zero, reducing inequalities and the kind of economic growth that the country desires will also help it stand the test of time, as ICE points out. In contrast, setting out too much detail about individual schemes and how to deliver them, or overly reflecting short-term political priorities, will risk it fast falling out of date.

ICE acknowledges that any strategy must be part of a long-term process which is agile and manages uncertainty. It believes it should set out a long-term vision of 20–30 years, but be subject to five-yearly reviews, which would enable politicians to influence it, once in a political cycle. A further ‘trigger point’ mechanism would allow a response to significant changes in the external context. That might well mean climate related consequences, global instability and economic upheaval.

Surface transport is the largest carbon emitting sector in the UK, and as the Climate Change Committee reminded us only two weeks ago, little improvement is being registered against plans for that liability to be significantly reduced. The government has also admitted that the UK’s transport networks could not cope with extreme temperatures. It is expected to take decades to retrofit an ageing rail system with infrastructure able to withstand such conditions.

Many responses to the ICE’s consultation on its position paper made clear the benefits of a UK-wide strategy. It makes sense to address certain modes at a UK level, particularly aviation and maritime, and as well as the English policy position there is still space for a high-level overarching transport strategy for the UK as a whole. Across all modes, passenger and freight journeys and the network infrastructure do not adhere to subnational borders. In 2021, the Union Connectivity Review (UCR) — a personal initiative of the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson —  looked at how the UK’s key transport corridors could be strengthened through a multi-modal lens. However, the government has not yet responded to its recommendations.

England itself would benefit from a framework for developing multimodal long-distance corridors. The ICE review points out that the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has recently highlighted the benefits of ‘an interurban transport strategy’ for road and rail to support growth across England’s regions. It could also be the basis for defining UK-wide strategic corridors and where responsibilities for them sit – perhaps building on the work already carried out in the UCR.

An overarching UK-wide transport strategy could also address aspects of the transport system that are not devolved and enable a more coherent approach to issues with a national impact. Objectives such as net zero are also UK-wide. 

A pragmatic approach would be first to develop a national transport strategy for England, which would give its national agencies, subnational bodies, local transport authorities and modal operators a framework of objectives and guiding principles against which to respond with their own plans.

An English strategy could even serve as a foundation for strengthening co-operation between the four home nations around a common set of high-level objectives, identifying interdependencies and improving the co-ordination of delivery.

The ICE’s top recommendation from its review is that a national transport strategy for England should be developed to set out an overarching vision of a sustainable transport network. As the Institution puts it, “this should establish a ‘golden thread’ of desired outcomes across modes and levels of government by drawing together the existing array of strategies into a coherent framework, and identifying and addressing policy gaps and areas of need”. It should set out how transport will contribute to delivering net zero and an equitable transition, it continues. It should also identify other long-term economic, environmental and social priorities, such as economic growth, reducing inequalities and climate resilience. “This should clarify the role of transport in delivering them and the appropriate level of investment between modes and regions”, ICE believes.

Whilst it might suit the constituency of infrastructure-focussed interests that are embodied within the Institution of Civil Engineers for it to suggest that a strategy should enable prioritisation of transport projects to form a pipeline of projects and long-term funding commitments, all that is a very big ask, as already mentioned. The idea of a settled strategy around which infrastructure investment can happily be pushed forward by a succession of governments of inevitably different hues seems like an unlikely political outcome. Though a timeframe of 30 years, as suggested by ICE, would helpfully align with the 2050 net zero target and also with Treasury Green Book-compliant business cases, which commonly use a 30-year time horizon when evaluating capital investment, it is an awfully long time in politics.

The debate over the primacy of economic growth over all other potential pathways, including one properly addressing climate change, is not yet resolved, and does not seem likely to be by the alternatives expected to be on offer at the forthcoming General Election. There is no clear agreement on what should be the right trajectory for housing development, for example, a matter of very considerable importance in transport planning. Nor is there even a settled position on the issue of ‘predict and provide’ in respect of highway provision, with the current consultation on the National Networks National Policy Statement exposing deep differences on what should be the guiding principles for enhanced road infrastructure development.

A set of clear principles and intentions for transport’s role in the nation’s further development, and specifying where it should be subservient to other considerations, is nonetheless much needed. A start on that, at least, would be a useful basis for the continuing discussion and decision-making which will inevitably form the backcloth to the way the transport system evolves.

It is arguably neither a national transport plan full of detail, nor even a national transport strategy with specific aspirations for the system, that would be most useful. But rather a set of more general objectives and values against which individual transport decisions can properly be judged. A debate on that alone is long overdue, and would be highly desirable. Perhaps the select committee’s new investigation will be the beginning of that.

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT873, 17 July 2023.