Transport Insights

West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin has cast further doubt over expectations that the region’s mass transit plan will deliver trams, admitting that she is in a battle to prove to the Department for Transport that “it can’t be a bus”.

Her comments at a meeting of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s (WYCA) Scrutiny Committee came alongside a refusal by transport secretary Heidi Alexander to confirm that mass transit would include trams.

Brabin signalled the size of the battle by again publicly citing the support of chancellor and Leeds MP Rachel Reeves:

It’s going to be a tram And as the chancellor of the exchequer said on camera, when she was interviewed about what Mass transit was going to be, she said, And Tracy, I said it was going to be a tram.

However, we have to make the case, and that is fine. We are now in a process where we have to prove it can’t be a bus, and that’s fine. We’ll do that, because it will be a tram.

At times Brabin seemed unsure whether she and Reeves were on the same side as Alexander or aiming for different outcomes, following the “resequencing” of the scheme on the back of a report from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) last year:

But there is a process to go through, but we will do it in lockstep with government, and I hope that you’ve seen from these letters, the partnership approach that we are taking, whilst there has been a bump in the road, and it has caused a delay, and that I’m enormously irritated about.

However, we are now at a place where, actually, let’s, you know, dust ourselves down, and we are now side by side with government, and we share the same ambition. We have the money confirmed, we are on our way. This project is not paused, it’s not delayed. It is en route to delivery.

The problem is, as always, that the WYCA has refused to release the NISTA report on the grounds that it would undermine confidence in the project.

She really can’t have it both ways.