Urban Transport: Future Funding

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Sharma. I thank the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) for securing today’s debate on a really important issue. I stayed down to make sure I spoke in this debate because it is such an important issue. I am sorry it has not had the support that it merits—perhaps Members are demob happy on the last day before recess. Nevertheless, the hon. Member managed to cover the whole range of issues in his speech, so he made up for the fact that nobody else is here to speak in the debate.

The hon. Member said that 45% of those in the lowest income quintile do not have access to a car, which is something we often forget. Outside London, that represents a real restriction on people’s mobility, freedom and opportunity to secure a job. He spoke about cheaper bus fares for young people. He might be interested to know that as of the start of this year people under the age of 22 can travel for free on buses in Scotland, which is an excellent new policy, not least because I have two daughters who can take advantage of that scheme and not have to be ferried around by mum and dad so much.

I do not plan to highlight too much more of the hon. Member’s speech, simply because he gave it just a second ago, but he did speak of the importance of devolving transport powers, which I will speak to.

Urban areas account for over half of the UK’s overall carbon dioxide emissions. If the UK Government are to meet their own target of reaching net zero by 2050, it is critical that towns and cities are equipped and funded properly to renew and transform their transport systems from the fossil fuel-based networks in place at the moment to zero emission and low-impact structures. Sadly, the Government’s record so far does not inspire confidence that that key part of the transition is a priority. The Minister, who in my opinion has one of the best jobs in government—I am quite jealous—has a hard task in being able to do the job properly and secure the required funding, because decarbonising transport is a mammoth task. I do not think she will enjoy much of my speech, so I give her that warning at the start, although she probably expected it.

Colleagues—certainly the Minister—will have heard me outline the Scottish Government’s transformational plans for active travel. I make no apologies for bringing them up again because they show the kind of ambition that is needed from the Department for Transport here in London. The active travel budget in Scotland will rise over the next three years to account for 10% of the overall transport budget, bringing the annual investment to at least £320 million a year—in UK terms, over £3 billion a year.

This year alone will see a 37% increase on last year, and within two years we will have seen a threefold increase in the active travel budget, representing £60 per person per year. The DFT’s plans amount to £2 billion over the next five years, which works out at just over £7 per person per year of active travel. The difference is utterly stark. Indeed, by 2024-25, Scotland, with less than a tenth of the population, will be within touching distance of what England spends on active travel. That represents a lack of ambition and an absence of vision. If we are serious about meeting net zero targets, we need game changers across society, and we need to ensure that in urban areas, where, in Scotland, 70% of our population lives, citizens are given real options for that change.

This is not just about the national and global picture. Members from nearly every constituency can see the tough time that our high streets are having. A combination of the pandemic, an increase in online shopping, and the hollowing out of household income over the last decade has left our town centres hanging by a thread. Supporting active travel and the idea of 20-minute neighbourhoods in Scotland can also give a boost to town centres, encourage more local spending, and give local authorities a more sustainable income stream generated by flourishing local businesses. Buying and selling locally also helps to cut carbon emissions, creating a virtuous circle that gets even more bang for our bucks.

Active travel is key to that change, but on the evidence so far the ambition from the Treasury and the Department for Transport simply is not there. I genuinely hope to be proved wrong in that respect. As has been said already, buses are fundamental to urban transport. There are nearly 40,000 buses in use on Britain’s roads but they need to be replaced, not only as part of the switch to zero-emission vehicles but to provide a more attractive service to people considering changing from private transport.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have asked the Department for Transport for figures on buses, in particular how many of the 4,000 zero-emission buses promised through the ZEBRA scheme are actually on the road, transporting passengers and contributing today to reducing emissions. The Prime Minister promised those 4,000 buses by the end of this Parliament, which at the very most is less than three years away, although if we believe the chairman of the Conservative party it might be only a year down the road. At the current rate, however, there is zero chance that the Prime Minister’s pledge will be met and that simply is not good enough. It is letting down the residents of towns and cities across England yet again.

The truth is that six months after the Prime Minister made his pledge on 4,000 buses, the Scottish Government have got on with delivering. Their Scottish ultra-low emission bus scheme, or SULEBS, delivered 272 buses, and just four weeks ago the Transport Minister, Jenny Gilruth, announced the first phase of the £62 million zero-emission bus challenge fund, or ScotZEB, for a further 276 buses. That is 548 buses delivered or ordered in Scotland, which is the equivalent of nearly 5,500 buses in England. To my mind, that is incredible progress given the challenges of the last few years and the budget pressures that have been forced on Scotland by Westminster.

Despite the long-awaited but very welcome recent announcement of the ZEBRA funding for 943 buses, which the Minister will probably touch on, that is—according to the Government’s own data on the website that accompanied that announcement—only 1,678 buses since the pledge was made. Scotland has delivered 327% more zero-emission buses in this Parliament than England and we are far from finished.

There should be no reason why the DFT is lagging so badly behind the Scottish Government. We have broadly the same goals; we both drive on the left. To my mind, therefore, something has gone badly wrong for the DFT, or perhaps, in fairness, more likely with the Treasury. I hope that the Minister will ask searching questions of her Department but she will more likely have to ask them of her Treasury colleagues, because at the moment the Government are just not delivering on the pledge that the Prime Minister made.

The situation in England is an indictment of the lack of urgency that seems to pervade the DFT’s attitude to the kind of transformational change that is required if the net zero targets, both in transport and more generally, are to be met at a UK level. That attitude has been perfectly demonstrated by the priority of the Treasury when it comes to funding local bus services; as has been mentioned, the Treasury’s priority has been to slash those services. The UK Government’s Bus Back Better strategy, complete with a fairly gushing foreword by the Prime Minister in which he boasted of his love of buses, might as well have been stuck in the shredder just months after it was published, because local authorities were told earlier this year that their budget pot would be slashed.

We know that urban areas are more dependent on public charging points for electric vehicles, which is down simply to the different balance of housing stock in more built-up areas. That situation requires local and national Government to raise their game to ramp up the installation of public chargers radically. I am pleased that Scotland is leading the way. Outside Greater London, we have the highest number of charging points per head of any part of these isles, including double the number of rapid chargers per capita that England has.

However, we cannot transition to a future without combustion engine vehicles by leaving flat-dwellers and anyone without a driveway with no route to switch to electric. In Scotland, 36% of people live in a flat, but in Edinburgh that figure rises to 64%, in Glasgow to 71% and in Dundee to 50%. That pattern is broadly similar across England and Wales. We cannot end the sale of carbon-fuelled cars in the coming years without making sure that urban areas have their public charging network properly designed and properly funded.

The National Infrastructure Commission review found that 300,000 public charging points were needed ahead of 2030. Currently, only 35,000 are in use. Norway, with a population only one twelfth that of the UK, has around 17,000, so we urgently need rapid expansion of the charging network if the NIC’s target is to be met, and that expansion is particularly needed in built-up areas.

The Transport Committee, of which I am a member, recently published its report on road pricing. It is clear that as internal combustion engines are phased out, a new way of collecting revenue will be needed, because fuel duty and vehicle excise duty will dwindle to zero under the current system. That sea change in financing, on which I think the debate is just beginning, must also apply to local and regional transport funding. Frankly, it is unacceptable that an organisation such as Transport for the North can see its core funding slashed by 35% at the whim of the DFT.

Local and regional authorities need long-term certainty in their funding streams and, given the types of capital-intensive work that they want to carry out, annual budgets cannot be turned on and off like a tap whenever the Treasury is feeling under the cosh. Urban renewal and the net zero transition are huge long-term projects, and the bodies responsible for delivering them on the ground need the long-term certainty on where the money to pay for them is coming from.

We saw that with the Tyne and Wear Metro, with nearly 40-year-old rolling stock replaced only when the Chancellor signed off on the funding. Up until that point, the transport authority could not be sure whether the trains—built when Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister—would be replaced any time soon. That is no way for transport investment to be carried out. Local authorities need certainty in the medium-to-long term on how the renewal investment will be funded—whether through raising revenue locally or national Government cash.

To conclude, as with so much that is sub-optimal in the UK, the over-centralisation of power through a single Government Department is hindering towns and cities across the country and our ability to meet the challenges of the coming decades. Getting the Treasury to release its grip and devolve power to towns, cities, metropolitan areas, and the devolved Administrations, is fundamental to allowing local decision makers to build the transport networks of the 21st century. The dead hand of Whitehall is holding millions of people back, and it is high time that the Government accepted that.