Transport Insights

Transport ministers have again resorted to lying to justify their obsessive secrecy – this time over the secret “peer review” of the West Yorkshire Mass Transit programme.

As I have written, the peer review was carried out by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA), despite the project not being a part of the government’s major projects portfolio, and resulted in the project being “resequenced” and delayed by years.

Both the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) and the Department for Transport (DfT) have refused to publish the review, amid claims that the public presentation of its findings has been “dishonest”.

Now very junior transport minister Keir Mather has made up a tradition for NISTA reviews going back through “successive governments”, despite the body only having been created (by Labour) last April.

Asked by Tory David Simmonds if the government will place the review into the public domain, Mather said:

All major project reviews undertaken by NISTA are treated as confidential, in the interests of ensuring that everyone involved is able to share their honest feedback. This has been standard practice across successive governments.

Not only is the claim that NISTA reviews have always been confidential a fabrication – and indeed the phrase has no meaning in this context – but the excuse for not publishing the West Yorkshire one is a departure from what the DfT has previously said, which is that the project is subject to “live” policy discussions.

Mather’s lie follows fellow transport minister Simon Lightwood falsely claiming the smart motorway “POPE” evaluation reports whose publication the DfT delayed for years were subject to an “assurance” process.