Transport Committee

Wednesday 10th June 2026

(began 20 hours, 27 minutes ago)

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09:15
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Hello.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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So what I'm about to say might sound slightly negative. So I first of all just want to say that it exists. And no previous government this century has even attempted to publish an integrated transport strategy. So huge amount of credit for doing so. And secondly, it's full of good stuff. Almost everything in the right things to do. A well motivated government doing the right things is to be applauded. However, it feels like there's been a sort of semantic misinterpretation.

It is literally an integrated transport strategy, as in it takes all the transport strategies and integrates them into one document. What it is not is a strategy for integrated transport. Now that's great because it means that, you know, we will get things wrong first time we try to do something ambitious. And this is the first time this century. So it's brilliant. There is a lot of opportunity to improve version two, and I really hope version two is currently in the works, because what this document does is it lists a whole load of activities, almost all of which are single mode.

So great stuff like improving regulation of tyre wear, um, and improving noise standards for aviation and a bus survey. And it's all great stuff, but it does not include any of the key features necessary to create an integrated transport strategy. In some places you have things like the bus fare cap, where that is actively a harmful policy to integrated transport. And it is commended by this strategy as opposed to saying, how do we learn the lessons from doing something that was determinedly single mode and made integrated transport harder and fundamentally, an integrated transport strategy needs to define the targets.

We're trying to achieve the obstacles and a pathway to get there, and it doesn't quite manage that.
09:18
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Thanks.
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09:19
None Portrait Speaker 4
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Chair. Thank you. So to answer your question briefly, it's a tough but fair question. The longer answer is if I start with the positive also because I think in our world of shared transport, car sharing, bike sharing, e-bike sharing, e-scooter sharing, Lyft sharing, um, and with. A deep interest in mobility hubs that physically integrate that with public transport and active travel. Which is why we are so interested in integrated transport as a topic. It's something hundreds of thousands and millions of Britons are using, partly with shared and public and active all day long at the moment.

But it needs help. There are some really important things to recognise here, which are firsts for from UK government. So there's the commitment to scale up shared mobility. There are multiple references to specific modes within shared mobility throughout the document. There are some references to mobility hubs. Nothing like as much as we would like to see, but these are all firsts. That's perhaps a rather scary observation. You could argue that the economy of the size of ours should have got there long before, but it is a fact, and it's to be commended that that is in there.

Um, what I think this isn't really is a strategy. Agree with Thomas's point there. Um it is I suppose, a vision. It calls itself both a strategy and a vision, um and I, my conclusion is a bit confused as to what it's actually trying to be. I think it is more a vision than a strategy. Hence the thoughts. I've also join in with the thoughts and hopes of version two, because it is a very, very welcome start.

But as I'm sure we'll get on to later, there are lots and lots of omissions, lots of ironically failed connections within it. And I think last point that it. It lacks ambition. There is an odd qualification in the very name of it. It's better connected, better than what?What I want to be thinking about is really excellently connected strategy, please. Um, as you know, other countries are pushing forwards with. So there is lots to commend here.

There's also a lot to work on.
09:22
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Thank you Jamie.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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I think it is very positive. I think it's a further building block in what the government are trying to achieve. We've got the bus market being reformed very positively at the moment. We've got rail reform going through. In terms of legislation. We've got legislation on English devolution that in transport and other areas tries to get decision making at the right level. We've got longer term healthy capital funding settlements from government through the transport for the city regions programme.

So I think this strategy builds on all those building blocks. And I think why I find it very positive is it's very people focused, it's very practical. It talks about simplicity of things like ticketing, and it does cover key themes like how do modes join up with each other?How does transport join up with housing development and planning, and how do we reform the whole way in which transport projects are appraised, which is a very key issue for regions outside of London and South East?The negatives for me is that the strategy is almost silent on freight, and the government's key priority for economic growth makes me think that there needs to be something more compelling and coherent on freight.

I would say that within our region, we have the Port of Liverpool that handles almost half of the UK's transatlantic trade, 90 to 95% of trade comes via maritime corridors, and there is nothing in the 41 commitments at the end of the strategy that is bespoke or specific to freight. So I think that's a very big silence that needs to be tackled. I don't think it's bold enough on accessibility. I think there's far more that could be done, and there's not enough on affordability of travel, which I think is one of the big issues of our times, and hopefully we could explore that more with the committee.
09:24
None Portrait Speaker 1
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We will. Michael.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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So in our submission to the call for ideas, we recommended six priorities. They were integration across transport modes, empowering local authorities, balancing capital and revenue funding, harnessing data and technology integration across wider policy areas and departments. Growth and planning alignment. So that's six. We recommended the eight priorities that we see in the strategy map directly to at least three of those. I'd say empowering local leaders, data and technology and transport and development, and the partnerships principle really maps across to our priority of integration across wider policy areas.

So I think from our point of view, four out of six, not bad, but there is less on capital and revenue funding. And as we've already mentioned, a noticeable absence of practical detail on integration between modes. So we'd like to think of integrated transport, if you like, as a hierarchy of three things. The first would be everything that pertains to spatial development. The second then would be integrating that infrastructure in your spatial development strategies. And the third would be things like operations, ticketing information, all of that.

So really at the top of this, we have, um, pie, the payments and information set of priorities, which includes multimodal contact lists, project coral, mini Switzerland, things like this. Absolutely fantastic. But we'd put that, if you like, as the third priority. Everything which pertains to payments, information, the top really needs to be that spatial development where you put your infrastructure and then how you have the sort of people focused approach. We think it's very, very welcome overall. However, I mean, the fact that we have the strategy for the first time in 25 years is extremely welcome.

The framing is very strong. It's great to have something which really supports our sector. So there's lots in there which really recognises that two out of five of the poorest demographics don't have access to a car, for example, lots on accessibility, which is very good. But if it were to be better, I think perhaps we look at people, places and partnerships we could think perhaps about. As I've mentioned, planning, positioning and payments, if you like, perhaps look at a new hierarchy and the really key things which could be added are a modal hierarchy.

So we in the sector, we're all familiar with the sustainable transport hierarchy walking, wheeling, cycling at the top, private cars at the bottom. There's not really a recognition of that sense of priorities. There's a distinct lack of a shift target, which was promised in the Getting Britain Moving document in advance of this government, and not much mention of Wales and Scotland. They have strategies. How does this fit with those?As has been mentioned by Jamie, nothing on freight and logistics, which is important.

And there is a data and technology section. But it's curious that perhaps the biggest revolution to mobility at the moment in data and technology is autonomous vehicles, driverless cars. I don't think there's a single mention of those. So it would be good to see some recognition of what's coming down the track there.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Um, I think, I mean, I certainly recognise what Thomas said there. You, you do need and it is touching on what Michael said, you know, it's, it's very striking how little net zero climate action, climate change is referenced here, which I think is a concern in itself. But it also points to this lack of the wider big picture legislative target context that I think Thomas was referring to there. This isn't tied in to stuff that, if you like, is above it that's controlled by other departments in part, um, transport and taxation is I think another very obvious example.

Uh, to be fair to it, it does have a crack at this on spatial developments, which is welcome. Um, but you don't come away with a sense of right now, Mhclg and DFT are going to be working together on. This um, I sort of scored it if you like. By when. Why, why I think it's, you know the when is pretty much absent. The why, as I'm saying, is also pretty much absent the what is where. It's got quite a lot of content.

The how I think is weak. This, I think, goes to your action plan sort of question. Uh, the who is very weak. Um, so to give a specific in our world, uh, it is very difficult at the moment to get shared mobility and rail to co-locate, work together, etc. that to me is a very obvious starting point, not least because rail sector is being nationalised, of course. So surely that's a huge opportunity, but very, very little on that join up point.

And the where it does go there a little bit with the urban suburban rural split, but not enormously. So, um, I think if you contrast it with, for example, Ireland has got and is trying to do there, there is a national overarching plan. There are then sub plans per segment of transport. And I like the fact that you can look at the commitments list there and it has timings and people against it. And then they publish an annual progress report. So you can see how it's actually going.

But we don't have that here.
09:31
None Portrait Speaker 5
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If I could just give one example where it does actually go into a target, but not really with the actions, and it's quite tentative. It's it's about rail station accessibility. And it talks about a figure of 66% of stations or journeys using stations that are accessible. And we'll try and get that to 71% by 2029. I think we've got to ask ourselves the question, is it acceptable to go into the fourth decade of this century with three out of every ten journeys still struggling with inaccessible stations?Our mayor has set a target locally.

We are quite well progressed, but his target is total accessibility. All stations across the Liverpool City region by 2030. And hand in hand with that, we introduced a new fleet on the Merseyrail network, which we control and made adaptations to the platform, as well as bringing in the new trains so that people can do what's called level boarding, which is particularly helpful for those with buggies or wheelchairs. And it's one of the best, but quietest transport revolutions there have been, because people used to have to pre-book assistance at stations if they needed to get down to the platform and then via a ramp onto the train, it has reduced pre-booked assistance bookings between 80 and 90% since introduced, and has been a huge boost for people travelling independently.

But again, in the report it talks about working with industry as to whether new fleets can be brought in and perhaps could be level boarding. So I think on something like accessibility, it's got to be bold and it's got to be a call to arms for a new organisation like Great British Railways, because there is a national accessibility scheme called access for all. But it's done in a very protracted and very slow way. And the rail industry needs an instruction from something like this to move much, much quicker pace.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Okay. Alex.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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On the biggest gap is largely around integrated transport. Bizarrely for an integrated transport strategy, there are eight stated priorities. None of them refer to integrating timetables at all anywhere in the document other than a brief reference under Mini Switzerland, but it's not a priority. Um, I'd like to really emphasize the point about autonomous vehicles. Government feels like it's become very myopic on autonomous vehicles. Um, the robotaxi proposition that has been brought by Silicon Valley. Um, there was a press release recently that quantified the benefits of that of autonomous vehicles to the UK economy as 42 billion, which seems an absolutely insane number.

This number was picked up by the BBC. It was widely used. Um, I asked him, the AV expert, to dig into where that number came from. It is a pre-COVID estimate for the value of a UK AV manufacturing sector, i.e. to use it in the context of a partnership with a robotaxi company is absolute, total nonsense. It is a nonsense number, but we are being pulled in the direction of saying that robotaxi is equal. AV now, if you look at the potential for AV as part of an integrated transport network in Oslo, they have the largest pilot of Avs as part of the integrated transport network in Europe, the local transport authority, Ruter, has a fleet of autonomous vehicles that they are testing, putting shuttles to local rail hubs to enable first and last mile connections.

Now, there's a lot of challenges in that. There's a lot of the cost needs to fall dramatically for that to become viable at scale. But if you're starting integrated transport strategy to not be looking at the opportunities of autonomous vehicles as potentially a transformative, integrated part of a public transport network, then you're missing potentially a huge opportunity. And this sense that we have to do what Waymo is asking us to do, um, feels dangerous. We've done this before, and we're having this debate now around social media and around AI.

We need to decide what we want from autonomous vehicles. And if there's one place that should be front and center, it's an integrated transport strategy.
09:36
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Okay, Richard.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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And Michael.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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Yes, I don't want to spend too much time talking about modal integration because we have discussed it, but it is important. And I think there's a case for there to be one of the sets of principles, which is about modal integration. The case studies are very interesting but very varied. It almost tries to do everything and in so doing misses out opportunities for case studies of what successful integrated modes looks like. I think out of those case studies, I mean, Liverpool City Region is a fantastic one, of course, but also Nottingham is a very interesting one.

That's the only clear example of a region where there's successful integrated modes. But that case study is there because of the workplace parking levy. So for example, might there be a case study of Hull Paragon Interchange. This is where rail and bus actually work together and say that's the way to do things rather than Bristol Temple Meads as as present, for example, how do we achieve modal integration?That would be good. Just the other thing I think it's important to mention, and this is something we asked for, which is if we think about GBR becoming the second largest employer after the NHS, we requested that non-emergency patient transport and health service should be integrated.

And it's good that actually the strategy does mention that 66% of people over 65 can't reach a hospital within half an hour. That's really, really important. And we can look at other trip generators as well. Schools of education, people who don't have the ability to drive and think about how those major trip generators are really integrated with the transport network itself.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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I mean, I'll start by saying um no. Um I mean I think the case studies, as has already been said, are a long list of outstanding achievements in all kinds of highly disparate areas. And they're fantastic. And I enjoyed reading them. And it gave me a great warm feeling. Um, but fundamentally there was, there aren't that many great case studies of multimodal integration outlined in the document at all. I actually ran the document through a large language model and asked it to assess and categorize each section of the document.

And by its estimate, which I would, I would say seems reasonable. Having looked at it myself, about 8% of the document is around new activities to promote multimodal integration, and 92% of the document is not, um, you don't there are really good case studies, actually, a lot of them are in Europe, and we could learn a lot from places which have been doing this very successfully for many years. There were no examples of where we can learn those lessons at all. But I think the fundamental point around multimodal integration is we need to be clear what the targets are, what we're actually trying to achieve through this.

Um, you know, there's a 14% figure quoted in the document that only 14% of journeys use more than one transport mode. Um, we all know the number of people who pile out of the train at Waterloo into the underground. The vast majority of those will be happening in London and the south east, which means that basically multimodal integration barely exists outside London, and a handful of other cities that have done this well. So, you know, as a start, we need a target for improving access to opportunity.

It references the Dft's connectivity tool, but sort of stops that can form an access target where we can measure every UK citizens access to employment, health and education as a single metric and target improving that. That is the purpose of transport and then as an integrated transport strategy, improving the number, the increasing the number of journeys that are made multimodal. And as Michael says, a mode share target, because that has always been an explicit part of the purpose of an integrated transport strategy to make people easier, for people to be able to use modes that aren't car.

Um, none of those targets are there. And as you rightly say, then you need the, the enablers to make that happen. And the case studies where that's been done.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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I would agree with what my colleagues have said, particularly Thomas. I don't think there are huge examples or exemplars outside of London and the South East. I think the focus and again, it's how much of the strategy can become an instruction to future authorities when they invest. The focus must be on how do you spend money in the future and how do you get it right?So we've got a scheme in Liverpool to try and modernise Liverpool Central Station, which is one of the busiest stations in the UK, and it's very close to Lime Street, which is another major rail station.

It's very close to Queen square, which is the region's major bus station, and the three don't interact at the moment. So if we are going to modernise central, it's not a rail scheme, it's how does it integrate with all the other transport modes, and then how does it integrate with all the place, the housing and regeneration around it?I would make one other point though. I don't think we should define integrated transport just as interchanging easily between modes. I think it's about integrated or common standards.

I don't think it's good enough to use the rail network, and you have real time information, and then you stand at a rundown bus stop that has no real time information, or that you're on the local bus and that runs to time, and then you get on a national train and it doesn't run to time. I think it's about having common standards, uh, which has all the operators, whether they're publicly controlled or privately controlled, working to a very reliable timescale timetable, I think quite a lot. The transport focus research doesn't show integrated transport as the top need for customers.

It shows reliability of services and affordability of services as the two critical needs.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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I would echo what Jamie said about standards, and I think there's something interesting here on RTI. That's real time information. Psd2 and safe and dependable journeys. And there's an emphasis on improving the quality of real time information. That's really important. But. And at which modal interchange is at a bus stop, is it at railway stations?We're making the case with industry colleagues for a standard for bus stops, because there hasn't been one, and there has been for railway stations.

That's the sort of thing which puts people off using the bus. The potentially the first interaction with the public transport network for many people is that bus stop. So that's really important. Standards are very important. I agree in alignment, enabling local authorities to work with central government on those standards. But I think going back to the question from Ollie about really, if there's enough on case studies or examples of successful intermodal integration, there is cycle rail integration. So we don't have a modal integration priority.

We have healthier communities in which we have cycle rail mentioned. That's about it. Mini Switzerland, we should say, is very, very welcome. The funding for Mini Switzerland, which Thomas pioneered, is superb, but that's in a category of payments information. So that's not really about lining up your modes or your infrastructure. Right. I mentioned earlier on Nottingham now Nottingham, I would actually say if you've not been there, get there as soon as you can. It's a phenomenal example of European style integrated transport.

It's astonishing. And what we find curiously in this country is often sort of intermodal. Debates, even within the transport sector. Is a tram better or worse than a bus or a train or, you know, a bike than a bus. And all these things which are seem quite, quite unfortunate because when you go to Nottingham, you see that there are more bus stops than you've ever seen in your life around this tram network in the middle. And it sort of integrates almost by default because you have all the modes there that all stems, of course, from 25 years ago, the last time we had a strategy, Nottingham had strong political leadership and a very, um, very willing minister who supported Minister, and they went ahead and used the powers they had to set up that workplace parking levy.

So that's an outstanding example. But I think really otherwise in the strategy, there aren't those case studies and they do really need to be. And what we need to have, going back to my earlier point, is a case study of how you actually get those modes integrated. And that is starting again with spatial development strategy. I should say Liverpool City Region, for example, have an extremely strong spatial development strategy which has transport at its heart. And those are the approaches that we really need to see more of in this strategy, really.

So spatial development sits first, how you actually connect those modes sits after that, and then operations, ticketing information like this. Because frankly, if you get a train to somewhere where there's no bus stop connected to it, you can't have an integrated journey. There's no point having multimodal ticketing if you haven't actually aligned those modes. So spatial development, integrating interchanges, and then operations.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah, it's a great question. So this this thing is in one of the very few examples of things I've done that are directly inspired by Boris Johnson, who is not normally my role model. Um, but this comes out of where I live in Walthamstow in East London, which was Mini Holland, which Boris funded back in 2014 as a demonstrator for what can be achieved on active travel and to an extent, the benefit of Mini Holland was just someone had tried to do it, and then lots of local authorities, leaders, officers would come and visit and walk around Walthamstow and say, oh, how did you do that?How did you do that?What was difficult?What was easy?What's the.

And they would learn whatever lessons they wanted to learn for their patch. So to an extent, one of the things that I would like mini Switzerland for clarity. Mini Switzerland is a demonstrator project in the East Midlands to integrate timetables, ticketing fares, information and physical integration. So doing what they do in Switzerland as a matter of absolute course and routine in one place, and what I would like that to be is simply partly how did you do it?Like East Midlands Combined Authority Mayor Clare Ward really stepped up and engaged with this.

DFT reacted really well to this. I'm a huge commendation to both of them. We published this report recommending Mini Switzerland in February and it was funded in this document, which is really great pace of activity across those two institutions. Um, what it needs to be is simply how did East Midlands Combined Authority do it?What were the challenges?How were they overcome so that there can be a learning opportunity for other places?Now, I also the metric in my mind for this is I would like to see the cost of subsidy per bus passenger to fall.

I do not envisage that the cost of providing bus services in the Hope Valley will fall, because there will be more better buses, but at the moment we are providing expensive, under-used buses as a social safety net. And what I would like to see is that we can provide buses that are well used at a lower cost per passenger, providing far more access to opportunity for people in the Hope Valley and for visitors to the Hope Valley. 1 in 3 people in Manchester and Sheffield have no access to a car and are de facto locked out of the national park on their doorstep.

And this is the kind of thing that can fix that. We know Transport Focus have offered to do a lot of the research, um for the Mini Switzerland project. And to an extent, the key thing here is just to learn stuff and publish it and allow lessons to be learned by different places for whatever is applicable to them. I'd also like to see other places. Obviously DFT funded Hope Valley, but I would like to see other mini Switzerland's because Hope Valley is only one place.

And you know, I know that various other places I've been speaking to over the course of the last few months are interested in doing their own mini Switzerland, which would be fantastic because then different lessons can be learned about its applicability in different geographies.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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Brilliant.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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You've just had a case study of exactly what that that's it. We can leave now. That's that's it isn't it. Um, the question you've just asked is the most important question as far as I'm concerned, of this whole thing. Why does this not happen?What what does integrated transport mean?It means integrated in place, integrated in price, integrated in times and integrated in terms of the customer experience. Now, this doesn't not happen because transport managers are stupid and they've never thought of it.

It doesn't happen because none of the incentives are designed to make it happen. So if you're going to integrate in place, it means a bus needs to divert via the railway station, which makes it take longer. If you're going to meet the train, it means the timetable needs to be designed to meet the train, which means that it will typically have to lay over longer at the ends of the route, which means typically you will need an extra bus in the cycle, which costs you both capital and operational investment.

If you're going to integrate fares, it means that the allocation mechanism will distribute that fare amongst two operators, not one, which will mean that the revenue per journey will be lower. So if you are managing a single mode personnel, whether in the public or the private sector, you are disincentivized to do this. And if you don't fix those incentives, then it will not happen. We have single mode management of transport in the UK, right up to director general level of the Department for transport.

Hence Alex's funding settlement for surveys. So until we fix those incentives, in addition to that, in Switzerland, there are 250 transport operators, all of whom have a legal duty to collaborate. In the United Kingdom, we have the Competition Act, which makes bus and rail operators very nervous about talking to each other on precisely the questions that we are asking them to collaborate on. So that's why I'm really hoping that version two of the strategy addresses precisely these questions. And coming back to the point earlier, the integrated transport is not one of the top priorities for passengers.

That's absolutely right. And the challenge we face here is it's a bit like the old transport planning joke. No one crosses the river, so there's no demand for a bridge. Um, at the moment. At the moment, people can't make integrated journeys so they don't they therefore don't live their lives around opportunity that integrated journeys would fulfil. And if you look at the centre for Cities Research, the only place in the United Kingdom that achieves its European benchmark productivity levels is London, which is the only place with a meaningful integrated transport network.

Every other city and region of the UK drastically underperforms on productivity. Therefore, GDP per passenger because per user, because people have to leave where they live for opportunity, because they can't get to places and that's what they do. And that's what happens across the UK. Which is why adding enabling proper connectivity would would increase GDP per year in the UK. Over over the long run by estimates vary between 70 and 200 billion. The scale of the opportunity from doing this is enormous, but you won't get existing passengers telling you they want it because they've moved to an overheated London, away from the places they live, because it doesn't exist.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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Yes. I think, um, absolutely agree with, with Jamie, um that there does need to be more on rural and what we need to see for rural is that people who live in rural areas have effectively the same menu of options as people who live in urban areas. There's good recognition in the strategy that 80% of people do live in urban areas, but 20% is a significant proportion, and they need to be able to decide, do I take the bus, the train, the tram?Do I take a private car, a taxi?Do I cycle?They need to have that same range of options as I say.

And if a car is the best option, great. But it needs not to be the only option. That's very, very important. That doesn't really come out in the strategy. However, it is very positive. Again, we've talked about Mini Switzerland. That's a rural demonstrator. That's a good thing. But what I think we should really be cognisant of is it might even be too simplistic to distinguish between urban and rural. What about coastal, you know, is Blackpool rural is Northumberland.

Rural?Is the Cotswolds rural?Do you know what I mean?So in terms of where wealth sits, it's not always so straightforward. And I think one of the most powerful things we've heard. Thomas's transport planning, um joke. But there's also the powerful parable, which I've increasingly started telling to people, and I'm surprised how many people don't know this fact that Blackpool used to have the busiest railway station in the world. It's now a multi-storey car park.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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The poorest canton of Switzerland, deep in the Alps, not Zurich bankers, has a higher GDP per person than any region of the United Kingdom other than London. When I spoke to Helmut Eichhorn, who runs the Swiss Pass Alliance, which is the organisation that brings together all 250 transport operators in Switzerland to develop integrated transport. I said to him, what's the number one thing we should do to enable an integrated transport solution like yours?And he said, the first thing you should do is make sure that your politicians and your people understand that this is the way to become a wealthy country.

And the point is, they don't think they are rich, so they can afford integrated transport. They think they are rich because they have integrated transport. The East Midlands and Switzerland are both similar lots of hills and a small. A number of medium sized cities in the East Midlands, 6% of journeys are made by public transport. In Switzerland a quarter of journeys are made by public transport, which means people have access to opportunity. Every village in Switzerland with 300 people or more has a direct bus to the station every single hour.

People are connected to employment, education, opportunity and health. We are nowhere near Switzerland. It will take us a long time to get to that level, but the starting position, as Helmut Eichhorn said, is that we have to convince ourselves of the truth that this is the way to become not just a wealthy city with a country attached, but a wealthy country.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Yes. So for clarity, the name is accepted within the industries involved. But the moment you talk to, um, just normal. ordinary. normal people, uh, it can go a bit awry because people don't necessarily know what the phrase means. So I agree there's a problem around the name. Um, government could help with that of course, by either pushing this name and defining it or coming up with another and better name, fine. I'm less bothered about the name and I'm much more bothered about what these things do.

So these are multimodal hubs where you're talking about physical integration. Ideally, you're talking about digital integration as well. But in our definition, bringing together at least one mode of public transport, at least one mode of shared and at least one mode of active in a way that improves public realm and does not foster further use of private car at the least. That last point you can push harder on, of course, depending on where you put the balance in these definitions. Um, something that continental Europe has embraced at scale.

Um, and actually something that although UK governments has no definition of one, and this document doesn't bring that forward, it has never had a policy around them. Um, it's never done anything about integrating them into other areas such as rail or NHS. All these obvious join up points, education and so on. As mentioned previously, it has actually, through a slightly dizzying array of different funding pots, funded some work here. So we estimate there'll be about 220 very conservative estimate publicly funded mobility hubs existing by the end of 2027.

So that's nothing like the scale that you would get in Germany, France, Austria, etc.. But it is of significance now. It's not just nothing. It's not just one small pilot and so on. So I do think it's an enormous missed opportunity to not put that front and centre here. As an example of how you go about the physical integration, then bridge into the digital integration on the back of that, because they're natural places for that. I think it also goes to a wider agenda here, which is also largely absent around, um, social value and community integration.

Um, which in part certainly goes to the overall access to opportunity, size of the economy points that Thomas has rightly been making. So in our experience, this is something mobility hubs are also extremely good at delivering. Um, in other words, they're not just transport interventions, they're very much health interventions, community interventions. They're profound sort of direct and indirect benefits. Um, so, you know, a major missed trick and the big picture on this is from a UK government perspective at the moment, there is absolutely nothing.

So there is no further funding, there remains no policy and no plan around mobility hubs. Um, which is obviously, uh, very hard cheese if you're one of those areas that were hoping to get one but didn't win that particular competitive funding pot game, but also has profound implications on the private sector side of this, where rather despite them because of, sadly, spatial planning policies, there are nonetheless a quite significant number of housing developers now who will put mobility hubs in developments as a default. Um, now logically, you'd be integrating all of these approaches across private and public sector.

You'd be looking at what's the UK's totality of mobility hubs and then who's delivered what and funded it is a second order question, but we have nothing on that at all. Um, so we fear not only are we not getting public sector ones in the future, but it probably has a chilling effect. And the private sector delivery of this as well, which in turn then has knock ons for the amount of sustainable transport viability that is in spatial development, which is a bit ironic because that's something that Better connected actually tries to make some headway on.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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I think this is really a challenging, uh, and I think that the opportunity or the cloud on the horizon is in the real sense, the setting up of Great British Railways. Got two almost diametrically opposed tensions here where GBR is being set up to make things more consistent. So that could take it towards centralisation. Uh, and lots of national control. And devolution is meant to take decisions down to a local level. So I think in evidence given to this Committee on Rail Reform, we didn't think the provisions of the rail bill were strong enough to direct Great British Railways, to think that they're now in a post devolved world, as opposed to British Rail, which existed up until the early 1990s.

So I think there's a real opportunity for Great British Railways to devolve a lot, a lot of local services. We've got situation in Liverpool City region where we have control over the Merseyrail network, which serves a large part of the region. But areas like Saint Helens and Halton get served by northern trains, which isn't as frequent, not as reliable as Merseyrail and we think there should be incentives and directions to Great British Railway to think about devolving, control those local services that shouldn't be managed at a national level.

I think the other point I would make builds on the example I gave about the port access road funding, that there's got to be a way of these national authorities having some degree of flexibility in how DFT and government moves funding between them. The concept of combined authority funding now for the major authorities is around something called integrated settlement. So we effectively get all the funding streams brought together in one pot, but then we have some degree of flexibility locally to move money from housing to transport, or vice versa, or regeneration or economic growth.

And I think these national bodies are set up to operate in a very, very bespoke way. So I wouldn't think that Great British Railways would ever volunteer money to national highways or vice versa. But I think there needs to be a stronger framework from DFT and government about how you flex money, and the port access road is the best scenario. There is a need to do something and it could well be multimodal. So putting the budget in the hands of one authority does not work.

There needs to be a better way of doing it.
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No, I mean, I think GBR is an enormous opportunity, but I don't think we are certain yet that that opportunity will be fulfilled. So if we look at the way transport integration in Switzerland works, all 250 transport operators in the country come together and they collaboratively make decisions. Switzerland has a highly collaborative and consensual political culture in which decisions are made by careful compromise. And as you know, our system in Britain is a tad different to that. So we're probably not going to become Switzerland.

So how do we achieve the outcomes in a model which is traditionally highly centralised?Um and the answer to that is you have to centralize the process of devolving, integrating GBR is the only organisation from a public transport point of point of view that's going to have the scale, resources and capability to become the anchor tenants of an integrated transport network. Now, I ran a Transport Focus webinar recently. We had Nick Heller on who runs customer experience for Swiss State Railways, and he said then they their mentality is they do not think station to station.

They think home to grandma. And that's exactly where GBR needs to get to. They won't run all the buses or the shared bikes, but they have got to absolutely feel that they are responsible for the customer journey from home to grandma end to end, and they are responsible for setting the standards and the integration mechanisms for bringing it all together. The two problems with that one rail people don't think like that at all. They think station to station have no awareness of what happens beyond their borders at the moment, because that's what they have historically been incentivised to do and to there is a very strong perception in combined authorities and bus companies that rail people, look down on them and think that they're more important.

And GBR has got to completely reverse that way of thinking and say, hey, we are here to help you. How can we integrate your services better?But no one else in a centralised model like the UK has, no one else is going to have the scale and capability to do it.
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Yeah.
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Richard.
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Um, I'm guessing we've probably most of us or all of us seen that episode of yes, Minister where Jim Hacker gets, uh, foisted into the role of transport supremo and regrets it within about four seconds. And there's a meeting in his ministerial office around the big table where all the different bits of DFT dot as it was then, I guess, gather and fight furiously like cats in a bag. Um, and, you know, things haven't moved on much, so the absence of national highways, as you rightly cite GBR, as we all keep on saying, um, you know, these critical agencies with enormous budgets and, and power and remits in better connected is, I think, worrying or we can try and tell ourselves it's an opportunity for version two, but it's certainly a missed trick.

Um, it never ceases to amaze and Nepal me how you can have something top level potentially net zero, for example. But then you look at the specific remit the national highways have, it's not there. It's there is nothing about the efficiency of use of their network. They're required, in fact, to provide for whatever traffic rocks up on their network, which is in many ways the opposite direction to travel in. Um, and then we're all mystified as to why we're not making more progress on transport emissions, which are stubbornly stuck and are the largest emissions of any sector of the economy.

So it's absolutely, vitally important, I think, a version of this, you know, V2 that's got more teeth would be a great litmus test. Has it got stuff in here which shifts the remit in the case of National Highways, and in the case of GBR, establishes the remit in the first place to be very much home to grandma, to be holistic and therefore be much better placed to deliver on integration. Otherwise, we're in effect relying on people, um, in bureaucracy. Pushing against the rule set that they live within, which is not going to deliver much.
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Thank you. Elsie.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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No. I mean private cars. Aren't mentioned that much. Um, which is, you know, I think very telling. Um it goes a bit to the sort of legacy point Jamie made. I always remember someone pointing out to me, we're in TfL's headquarters and saying, do you know there is not one person in this entire building who's thinking about the car?And, you know, it's the single most used mode in London, never mind the rest of the country.

So it's one of the many emissions. I mean, we did a list of largely of omissions, which I'll share in writing with the with the committee afterwards. We made it 64 of them. Um and we probably didn't put enough in on the private car front. So there are bits and bobs, as you rightly referenced, the national parking platform. Um, but it's, I think one of many things typical of this, um, documents approach where it gets sort of mentioned in dispatches, but there's nothing then on, well, how are we and who are we, by the way, going to then use the national parking platform to do what with it?Um, now, you know, I would argue that it relates potentially very heavily into the mobility hubs points that I was making earlier.

Um, I think we see the car parking, the private car parking revenue, tail wagging the local authority policy and practice dog all week long, week in, week out for years. And it's getting worse because the net resource available to local authorities has been decreasing. And they therefore look more and more keenly at car parking revenue and defend it more and more trenchantly, um, sort of civil war aspect that lots of us have been touching on is another example of it where you, you, you know, you literally see the warfare between the parking revenue folks, the commercial team, the whatever they're called, and the transport planners who will, generally speaking, want to do things that are quite congruent with the rhetoric of this document, but they don't have much or any help on the incentives and the structures.

And so they often lose that war. Um, so there's a huge amount there that's, you know, that's not said and is problematic. I think though, you have to, it is meant to be an integrated strategy. So if we were in V2, if we're going to be going into this space more, what you can't do is go into it in a siloed way. So you can't then have the private car section, which talks about cars and parking and insurance possibly, and all sorts of other issues it could get into, but fails to relate those and integrate those with the overall vision and other modes.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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I don't think they are particularly prominent. Um and actually just moving away from private cars for one moment. I don't think taxis and private hire vehicles are mentioned much either. And of course they can be very important last mile, they can take people from train stations late at night where there's security worries. Someone wants to jump into a taxi to to get home. So I think it's surprisingly silent on that. I think the big debate on cars, obviously there's a push on electric vehicle charging and helpful government funding to boost EV provision.

But could we face a scenario in ten years time where most private cars have become electric, which is great from the emissions point of view. But we then have clean congestion on the roads and particularly bus services are still caught up in the grounds of congestion and local roads, because car use has not in any way diminished. So I think there's got to be some sort of national discussion at some point around road charging. And how does the financial regime work going forward?I think the other point, um, this building and some of Richard's comments, and I think the challenge earlier that we don't look abroad for examples, you know, Germany.

With its culture has got quite extensive use of car clubs. And I can't proclaim that we do in the Liverpool City region. And I was looking at an interesting stat recently which showed that I think most cars are parked up for 96% of the day. It's literally the most inefficient use of any transport asset there is. You know, any airline operator, a ferry operator, train operator wouldn't have their transport assets parked up 96% of the day. So on the basis of that, it sounds like for many, many people, cars are, you know, could be seen in the future of public transport as good enough as an expensive luxury.

And you use the carrot to persuade them over into public transport. But I think there's more that the strategy could do to say, what is the future vision for how we treat private car use, and what more can we do to encourage people to think about car use, either in a different way, or to migrate over to public transport?
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Thanks. Michael.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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Yes, I think that point about the percentage of time that cars spend parked is a really important one to make, but I think this is also something which is good to reflect upon. People often think of the Netherlands as well as Switzerland. The Netherlands is a bit of a kind of epitome of effective, integrated and sustainable transport. But in the Netherlands, there's more car ownership per capita than there is in the UK, right?They just spend more time parked as it happens.

So I think there's a balance that we can strike in this strategy or indeed in V2, between having an honest vision about mode shift and saying that a greater proportion of journeys need to be taken by sustainable modes. And yet it's not anti-car. So it wouldn't get that sort of response as being anti-car. It's not about that. I think we need to be honest in that vision. What's not mentioned either is vans actually, and registered car ownership has plateaued over the last decade, but van registration has not.

That's really significant. And that keys into the absence of mention of logistics, freight and logistics at a national and local level. A lot of that creates congestion. And I know that, you know, perhaps there's politically there's an awkwardness in recent decades about talking about vans, understandably. But I think we need to be honest about actually how vans play a role in in the wider transport picture, um, car size as well. There's been a lot of good work done on increasing car size, if you want to call it SUVs or anything else.

That's very, very important at a local level. And from a safety perspective, there is good mentioned here in terms of, um, reduction of, of fatalities and casualties and the road safety area. But that doesn't really talk about the significance of increasing car size, which does have a measurable impact on people's safety. And finally, again, to echo the, the points made about car clubs and shared mobility, I think we're all pretty clear that if you think about other technologies, I mean, how we consume media, we've been streaming media for a long, long time.

Car clubs have been streaming for decades before, and we're really, really slow to catch up with that technology. The future, clearly, in many respects is shared. So I think it's very, very welcome to have guidance for local authorities, for car clubs. But actually, what would be better would be a really clear vision that car clubs will play, should play a much bigger role in our future integrated transport network, largely because of the point that Jamie made about how much time cars spent parked. That doesn't doesn't add up.

If you put that together with how much people might need to use a car, you then have a vision where you say, right, this many cars makes sense without being, you know, prescriptive on number, but you recognise that it's about sharing more as a society to achieve the goals that we want to achieve.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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I might just come in on the back of all of that. Very good points made by both. There's a missing philosophical point here that using a car doesn't mean owning it. Which is looking again at version two and the work that this committee played a key role in actually in getting DFT and ministers to take car and lift sharing somewhat seriously for the first time ever. And that's an ongoing point at this point. But there is to be potentially some policy to come out of that later this year.

So there's a wide open space here. And at the moment we don't have that basic philosophical point in. And therefore it is a big struggle. And when you look at the local transport outcomes, frameworks and equivalent setup as it exists now, as we enter this new devolved world, shared mobility, including car clubs, lift sharing are not on the list. There is no DFT data set that includes them, so it's not again, in the incentives and the remit as of yet anyway.

Um and that is a major mystery for two particular categories of use. Case one is people who can't afford a car at all would not have access to, which is the point that sharpens in particular around EV. The other is people who could. But for second car or first car, they don't really need one. Now the existence of car club enables them to use that car for those journeys, but also then tips them into enhanced public transport, active travel use for the other journeys where it's a marginal call.

Whether you take the car or you don't. And if you have the car sat outside your property or very close to it in your home, you are more likely to take it than not. If you don't and you're using car club, then you are more likely to make a considered use of it. And you look at we have tons of detail about this, which I've shared with the committee before, but if you look at why people use that, they're actually very considered about this and and logical.

So for sure there's a, there's a major set of missed tricks there. Um, I do think there's also it's important to recognise that, um, getting people away from private cars to an extent, it is not being full anti as Michael says, but it's to an extent is something that all of the countries have been running a list since only ask the question that have been making a more successful fist of this have also done.
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None Portrait Speaker 11
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That's clear.
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Thomas.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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I think, yeah, this gets really to the heart of it. I mean, what's the point of all this?Why are we all here?The purpose of transport is the maximum access to opportunity at the minimum cost. And the cost is financial. But it's also pollution, carbon use of scarce space. Um, safety and cars provide the best access to opportunity of all transport modes. But unfortunately they also provide the most of all of those negatives as well.

And so the purpose that we are here to achieve is the maximum of the good thing, the access to opportunity with the minimum of all of those negatives. And that's why from a target point of view, access to opportunity needs to be number one. But as cars provide the maximum of those negatives, we also need a mode share target in order to ensure that we don't achieve that in the wrong way. And then because those modes achieve those things in very different ways, in very different places, that then guides you to.

So in a very rural area, like a tiny hamlet, cars provide almost unlimited access to opportunity with almost none of the negatives in a congested urban center. They consume vast amounts of space and provide very little access because they immediately get caught up in traffic. And so we need to start with those very high level. What what's this for?What are the high level targets?And make sure that those are cascaded down, not just within DFT, but throughout the entire ecosystem.

And actually incentivized. Um, and V2 really needs to be anchored on that. As soon as we've been asked to give international case studies, I'll just add one car, one which is Rhizopus, which is the French national hitchhiking digital hitchhiking scheme, which is now across the country. And on average, people are hitchhiking in rural areas, have to wait five minutes before they're given a ride.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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In France.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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So there is reference in the strategy to cycle rail integration. Um, which is good to see. And in a sense there's more reference to that than there is to bus rail integration. In fact, um, and I mean we've got a top ten commitments. There are 40 commitments. We think ten of them are particularly good. And this, this includes Hk2, which is healthy communities. Two assessing the quality of cycle rail interchanges. That's a very good thing to, to have in there.

It's important to note, though, that the railways have been thinking about integrating with cycles for a long time. People know places Marylebone station in central London, but local railway stations tend to have cycle parking even within the station buildings. So it's not that this isn't happening. What's arguably more important is in fact, the highways infrastructure outside of that. And again, that's where one of these commitments is very strong. He, um, he wants. Is the one before HS2, which is about um, creating a new approach to network management duty guidance, which therefore lets the local authority become the highway authority and, and assess what's the best use of that highway.

Might it be a cycle path?Might it be a pavement, might it be a road?And at that point, you can start to think about integrating the infrastructure which gets people on their bikes to those railway stations. That's very significant. I should say also for active travel, um, there's a very, very good mention also of the commitment to updating traffic signs, regulations and general directions. And what this means is that we can have simple zebra crossings. That's a good thing.

Again, look at continental examples. Many parts of the world have zebra crossings at junctions or at side streets. They don't all necessarily have to have, um, have beacons and be signalled crossings. You can just, just walk across and that enables prioritisation of pedestrian flow and active travel to railway stations. So actually this isn't categorically linked to modal integration, but it's in there as its own thing. And that's going to have an extremely positive outcome.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Obviously a smart.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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A couple of points from me, if I might, around this, I think the very word ticketing is understandably used is also another thing that's, you know, something of a generation behind in that, um, if we imagine a world where you can do what Thomas was describing, Switzerland has in particular and move seamlessly between modes that would include shared mobility. It's not quite a ticket that is being used there. It's, it's, you know, it's a piece of expenditure. But I don't mean just a physical ticket, but even the notion of it, I think, um, is something that ideally this strategy would be making further headway into dispelling and bringing these barriers down, um, share mobility on the whole is not integrated with other forms of sustainable transport as a sort of journey spend, ticketing type level.

It's a major missed opportunity. You can see every, every tube strike where one option is suddenly taken away from people and a sort of grand behaviour change experiment on one level. Um, then there's a massive upswing in shared micromobility use in particular, and an interestingly significant percentage of those customers are sticky. They will then use shared micromobility much more than they did before. Now, without the intervention, they weren't going to have done that. The parallel, the analogy I'm trying to draw here is that if we had more things which surfaced these options alongside one another and even better, helped people make seamless journeys across them and make the payment ticketing side of that simple.

Um, for sure, we're going to be growing the number of people using them, but the reality we're in right now is that this strategy doesn't really get into that space much, and we've just had the future transport zone funding winding down. So we're there were a few pockets of examples of this actually public sector funded. Those apps have largely just been turned off because the funding doesn't continue. And so we've done the ludicrous thing of climb up the all the hard bits of the mountain to get something integrated in that area, get people using it and then take it away from them.
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None Portrait Speaker 9
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Anything else?Are we?
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None Portrait Speaker 13
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Yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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Very much so.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Let me. If I could achieve one thing today, I would love to drive a stake into the heart of this zombie concept. It drives me mad. We are still talking about it. Mass came out of Helsinki in 2014. It was a guy called Sampo's idea that like you have software as a service, you make one subscription payment and then you can just travel around completely freely on every transport mode. Really interesting idea didn't work because of course, what actually happened is everyone just used lots of taxes and taxes have a unit cost.

So you can't just have one subscription price. So then they said, oh well, never mind, we'll take taxes and things that have a unit cost out. It'll just be buses and trains. Then everyone said, oh, you've just reinvented the season ticket. Um, so I know, but it's an app. It's got an app. Okay, so it's an app for, for checking information and buying tickets, which is kind of where it's landed. Um, an app for buying tickets and checking information is fairly obviously a part of good business for anyone who offers a service.

It's an app. It's, of course, we have to have apps for buying tickets and checking information. London has TfL go. Most places have them. You don't need to call them mobility as a service because it's nothing like the thing that was originally called that name. It was 2014. We started talking about this. David Cameron was prime minister. We hadn't even had the Brexit referendum. We hadn't even had the general election before the Brexit referendum.

We have been talking about this for 12 years and nothing has happened because it doesn't exist. It's not a thing. It was an idea. It brilliant to live in a world where we can allow good ideas to bubble up, but we also need to live in a world which accepts that they didn't work, and we can let them die in peace. And that does not mean we shouldn't have apps. Of course we should have apps. Really important.

Why do I actually think this?Why am I going on about this?Why does it matter?Because while we see it as a thing like waiting for Godot, we wait for the mass fairies to come and solve our problems instead of just getting on with the normal day to day business government, fixing the framework, the targets and the incentives and local areas getting on with delivering the data, the apps, the integration to make it work. Stop talking about mass forever, everyone, please.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Yeah, absolutely.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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I think there's something on the notion of public, if you like. I mean, JK Galbraith would have talked about private wealth and public squalor. And if you think about a world in which we have characters like Elon Musk and, and so forth and promoting certain forms of mobility and whizzing past, um, you know, hollowed out high streets with dilapidated bus stops. That's what Galbraith was talking about. So I think there's a case for us to make the case more strongly for public infrastructure and going back to bus stops, I think this is really important.

We have technology available. If we use it correctly, we get to that situation where I think there's another Penaloza I think is attributed this quote, that the sign of a healthy society is one where the rich use public transport. All of that. Everybody deserves to have access to the best quality technology. And if you actually really see that as your kind of North Star, then you really get beyond digital exclusion. It's mobile phones again, and I think it's a really delicate balance to strike.

We don't sort of defer to the fact that in theory, lots of people have access to these things, whether or not they're even good for you, we actually say, no, no, no, that technology is available. We obviate this exclusion by investing in technology, being in public places. That's really important. And I should say that the the bus sector and those people who work on bus stop infrastructure and also work on railway station infrastructure get this. They really believe in it. So actually, there's something there that needs to be quite strongly articulated.

And it's about it's about the public. That's quite important.
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None Portrait Speaker 10
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Feels like quite a dangerous question for an officer to ask. I think my question would be, I think there is huge commonality, uh, in transport aspirations from across different groups within the region, regardless of political colour, because new transport facilities, new fleets or vehicles, affordable fares, anything that seems a positive step forward for the public, I think generally are accepted. I think there's two issues of concern that could apply at any time if there was change of political control. It strikes me that we've spent many decades arguing about the structure of the bus industry and the rail industry, and we've now sort of moved on because that's not what passengers are interested in.

They're not interested about public, private and contractual regimes. They're interested in good services. And I think the government have taken steps forward with rail reform and bus reform in harness, with the combined authorities, to almost put that argument to one side now and just concentrate on running the services. So if the arguments about structure started again, that wouldn't be particularly helpful for long term. And the other concern that I have, and again, this could apply in any region, is that in terms of trying to improve bus services, which like rail services and transport, focuses, surveys show bus passengers are most interested in punctuality and reliability.

Local authorities look after the local roads. So in terms of bus prioritisation, measure traffic prioritisation, bus lanes do get a scenario where you get one local authority regime that is in favour of doing all those things and then four years later, a different regime or a different leader who does not want to do it because in effect, with bus franchising, local authorities become the Network Rail of the bus and road network. And that's something that would be alarming if you were trying to get stability in bus punctuality and reliability.
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None Portrait Speaker 9
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Just throw a point in here. The absolutely agree strong and stable are not the same thing and we engage with local authorities where there's a lot of stability about shared mobility in their area, but there's too much stability because there isn't enough shared mobility in their area. And in fact, what I'm trying to get them to do is to be less stable, if you like. But in the sense of working harder with operators and so on to have more of it. Um, it goes to me to this question that hangs around a lot of this, I think about what actually is landscape going to be as the devolution act lands.

And none of us sitting here today quite know that, of course, but I thought it was interesting how mobility operator from another country described it to me as the reverse devolution Act the other week, and I knew instantly what they meant. So there's this hanging question, I think, as to what actually is being devolved in terms of power and on what basis. Now there's quite a lot of gap there, especially when you come to it from a shared mobility perspective into a sustainable transport one as it stands.

So I think if that carried on through and the existing sort of policy set didn't shift, but we have these new strategic authorities created and so on. I think there probably is some risk of, absent a clear direction around what actually are these areas really meant to be doing on sustainable transport, particularly away from the Metro PT heritage areas?It is more open to being pulled this way and that by politics or, or other forces.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Thank you Elsie.
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None Portrait Speaker 9
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I agree there's a big gap here. Um, and just to add, so there's a specifically big gap around shared mobility and its ability to help deliver this in an integrative fashion. What would that mean in terms of social value, economic value, environmental value. We have quite a lot of evidence on that. But there's not even a a. Goal, if you like, set in better connected around that. One of the point I wanted to make on this, um, is about elasticity in the jargon.

So. It's important to. I think have a goal of driving economic, social and environmental growth through this. But I think it's also important to recognise that that is about change. Because if the existing system was delivering everything brilliantly, we wouldn't really need a better connected strategy. So there's a recognition inherent here that we don't have everything brilliantly integrated today. So we're going to have to do some new and different stuff. And from our experience in shared mobility, uh, some of that you can analyse and estimates, um, but there are limits to how well you can estimate that because particularly in the case of mobility, things can really take off.

And if they really take off in a way that's not happened before, it's going to be a tough job modelling that on existing evidence base. Certainly. So there's a there's a point there about iterating very fast and understanding what's actually going on and what's driving success and working with that alongside being able to work on some more predictable things, again, in the nitty gritty, maybe there's a little bit of hope here with the opening up of appraisal systems, modelling systems, areas of research and so on at DFT that they could get a better grip on this.

But to answer the question, no, the strategy doesn't have this sufficiently at the moment.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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Not quite.
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None Portrait Speaker 9
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No.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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No no.
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None Portrait Speaker 14
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Thank you. And go on.
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None Portrait Speaker 14
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Go on.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Thomas.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Sorry.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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Qualified.
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