Strategic transport body prepares spending review bid

The Oxford-Cambridge corridor’s transport body will present the Treasury with an investment prospectus, its Chief Officer has revealed.

Martin Tugwell, Programme Director of the England’s Economic Heartland (EEH) partnership of businesses and councils, told the delegates at the Oxford Cambridge Corridor Development conference that the prospectus is designed to make the case for funds in the upcoming pan-government spending review:

He said: “We will be producing an investment prospectus for the spending review which is aimed at investors and will treat her Majesty’s Treasury as one of our investors but not the only one. We need to set out what investment will deliver in terms of level of service and what will unlock new jobs and houses.”
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He also urged the Government to show local people that it is committed to the corridor by producing a National Planning Statement (NPS) for the area: “If you are asking local communities and politicians to stand up and plan for growth, they need to know that Whitehall will be behind them in the future. The NPS is a powerful statement of intent of local and national policies.”

And it would reassure long term investors, like pension funds, which are looking for returns over a 30 to 40 -year timeframe, he said: “The NPS allows us to join things up and accelerate delivery, where you start to gain confidence of elected politicians and communities that investment will be there when it’s needed not after the event. We won’t deliver all of the infrastructure we need if we just look to the public sector, it never has.”

But Tugwell expressed frustration that the Government had not approved funding for two early road schemes EEH had identified even though it had given the green light to those prioritised by the equivalent regional transport bodies for the north of England and the midlands: “The longer that disconnect is between putting proposals forward and the investment decisions being made, we will lose the confidence of our local communities and business that ambitions are not being backed up with investment.”

And he said that delays, like that affecting the A428 upgrade between Black Cat roundabout and Caxton Gibbett, undermined confidence in delivery of the wider corridor: “If it’s meant to be delivered in 2020 but we don’t until 2023, the message to investors and individuals is that we can’t deliver.”

And adopting a programme approach would give infrastructure providers the confidence to train the workforce needed to deliver the corridor, he said, comparing the way the water industry delivers its five-year programmes with the more ‘stop and start’ approach to delivering transport projects. The sequencing of the corridor’s projects should be looked at ‘carefully’.

The construction of the next phase of the east–west rail, which he described as a ‘game changer’ because it will connect Oxford with Milton Keynes and Aylesbury, is due to commence the end of the year.

But he added that decisions about the route of the planned expressway road between Oxford and Cambridge should not be taken in isolation, adding that a similar approach will be taken to decide on the transport needs of the area to the east of M1 and central Milton Keynes: “If we want to hit the mark in terms of delivering on environmental objectives, we must not undermine the sustainable transport patterns we have built up through east-west rail.”

But Tugwell said that competition rules get in the way of efforts to create joined up public transport services by preventing the same companies from running both bus and rail services at a local level: “If you are bidding for rail franchises you can put in your bid about how you will integrate local buses because the CMA is worried about monopolies.”

Christine Doel, Director of Economic Development consultancy SQW, agreed with Tugwell that transport decisions need to be made in a systematic way but that scale matters too.

Emma Fletcher, Council Member of the Cambridge Forum for the Construction Industry, said that the key is to make the city’s public transport system ‘simple to use and easy to understand.’

She said: “In one of the smartest cities in the world, we can’t deliver this stuff, we’ve got to sort that out before stuffing more people into the system.”

 

The next Oxford Cambridge Corridor Development Conference takes place on the 22nd June. Click here to register for your ticket. 
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