Public Transport in Towns and Cities

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Monday 17th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I happily add my thanks to our two chairs; to our secretariat, who have been splendid over the period of the production of this report; and to my colleagues on the committee, who came from varied backgrounds. What a pleasure it is to follow the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst. I never thought that I would hear the 60 year-old report of Lord Redcliffe-Maud referred to but, like the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, I can remember it. It was a splendid report.

The possible scope of this report was enormous. It could have ranged—it has to a degree—from e-scooters to HS2. I will just concentrate on two things. One is London versus the rest, if I can put it in those terms, and the other is the variety of provision in cities of similar size and with similar challenges, in many respects.

On London versus the rest, the Government kindly referred us to the significance of this comparison in their response to our report. They said that, in their levelling-up White Paper,

“the Government set itself the mission of, by 2030, bringing standards of local public transport connectivity across the country closer to those of London”.

I give them full marks for ambition, but we need to test how they cope as they go along. Of course, we all recognise that London has unique characteristics in the provision of public transport, the size and reach of the area and so on, but still, these figures need to be put on the record.

The expenditure-per-head figures for 2019-20 are as follows—they are pre-pandemic, so perhaps not distorted by some of the pandemic factors. For London, it was £882 per head. The next largest region was the south-east, with more than £500 per head. The lowest was the east Midlands, at £300 per head. The average for all regions outside London was £489, which means that London is spending nearly double the amount of any other region in the country. Work that one out, Sherlock. It is not difficult to deduce from that that services in London are better than elsewhere.

What a civic or regional leader would give to have their expenditure availability for public transport doubled—it would have something of an impact, however competent or otherwise the leaders or the regions may be. I simply must ask the Government: how is their ambition progressing towards the deadline of 2030? Is it their intention to reduce the disparity on spending per capita? Do they regard spending per capita as a significant measure of how well the various regions are doing, or are likely to be able to do? Are they progressing towards any comparability at all with London?

The other issue, of the variety of services that apply in cities outside London, strikes me—I hope I am not the only one—as quite a significant factor. We know that all cities are different, that there are big contrasts and so on, but you would expect that large, urban areas in a fairly small geographic country such as ours would have some obvious similarities in the way that they tackle the common problems of urban transport. To give just one example of the contrasts that exist: Nottingham, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and a number of others have light rail systems, yet Leeds, Liverpool and Southampton are among the largest urban centres in Europe without a light rail system. There might be good reasons for that, but I am not aware of them, and I am not quite sure who would be able to tell me.

In our report, we looked at three particular types of urban transport. We looked at light rail. We looked at very light rail and, like the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, I am very keen to see how the Coventry experiment develops. It is scheduled to start in 2025, I think, and if it works as a very light rail system—with the advantages of light rail but without the huge costs of establishing the system and then maintaining it—it may be a model that is of value to everyone else. The third system that we looked at was a bus transit system, which has some of the advantages of light rail but cannot quite match it in terms of reliability, predictability and so on.

We made recommendations in our report which flow from this fact that I have tried to establish about the big variation across the country. One recommendation was that we should try to eliminate some of the disadvantages that exist in the funding system at present; the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, dealt with that, so I will not repeat what has been said. We make the case in our report for a block grant system, which would make life easier for people making the applications and make life more predictable for the local authorities or regional governments that exist. It is something that the Government should consider.

Perhaps most important in this particular area is that discussion and evaluation of the schemes that exist is absolutely fundamental. We are not talking about huge sums of money here, just the common sense of recognising that there are different systems in roughly comparable areas but no proper evaluation of how they are all working. With this, I am in fact suggesting something to the Minister that does not cost large amounts of money—though I fear that my suggestion that the regions should do as well as London would cost large amounts of money. This is why I would particularly like to hear her response on that point.