Transport Insights

I’ve been looking at one of the so-called “compact agreements” on how central government and northern mayors “will collaborate to deliver the next stage of Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR)” and wondering if it is less of an agreement and more of a collective whistling to keep their spirits up.

For a start, the agreements in fact cover several future stages of NPR and that’s really the point as ministers have chosen to chop the project into chunks to be delivered consecutively.

An then the agreement between transport secretary Heid Alexander, chancellor Rachel Reeves, communities secretary Steve Reed, and – last but not least – West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin opines:

We welcome the £1.1bn funding allocated for NPR development in this Spending Review period, allowing development work for the first two phases to proceed without delay, and the certainty implied by the funding cap of £45bn for the overall NPR scheme, which will guide development and future delivery.

So three cabinet ministers and one mayor, who is definitely not in a hostage situation, applaud a relatively small amount of development cash allocated by central government and a promise not to spend more than a specified amount, in place of substantive funding.

The agreement goes on to explain:

This will ensure resources are earmarked for future Spending Reviews, giving a much greater level of certainty, and there will be a process to monitor spend and delivery, and help apply the lessons of HS2, and avoid the project impacting funding for wider transport investments, including future Transport for City Regions rounds.

A small quibble here; the omission of the word “that” between “ensure” and “resources” is a journalism/PR trick, rather than something that would be done in a genuine agreement.

In any case, the logic of this is beyond me, although the idea of “a process to monitor spend and delivery” is genius. Why did no one think of this before?

I think possibly they are saying that setting a cap on what can be spent on all three phases will somehow make sure there is money left for the third phase but they have twice mentioned certainty and there is an obvious lack of certainty over how much money will be made available, and when.

I’m also a little bit concerned by the idea of a “funding cap of £45bn for the overall NPR scheme”, which seems to imply that while

local contributions will be considered for specific or additional scope

any such contributions will merely reduce central government’s contribution to the capped overall funding.

I don’t think that was the message they were trying to give, but that’s what the “agreement” says.