Transport Insights

Politics Home has published the full article by sister publication The House about the secret report on the West Yorkshire mass transit farce, setting out more clearly how mayor Tracy Brabin’s combined authority was working to a politicised agenda over the scheme’s timing and, in consequence, the scheme itself.

The House has obtained a copy of the 45-page “peer review” by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (Nista), which it says sets out 19 separate risks relating to the project’s governance, assurance and planning,

It says a “key recurring theme” in the review is the extent to which Brabin’s West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) allowed the scheme to be shaped “around a political agenda rather than a recognised programmatic approach” and that it specifically refers to her manifesto pledge to get “spades in the ground by 2028”, which is the year that she intends to stand for a third term in office.

According to The House, the report says of the 2028 pledge:

This date has been driving the planning for WYMT [West Yorkshire Mass Transit] and while it is vitally important to drive pace into delivery and also challenge current ways of thinking, there are elements of Managing Public Money, that government needs to adhere to.

The article quotes a “source who has been following the project closely”:

They were rushing so much to try and get something approved, to meet the political timescale of doing something in this mayor’s mandate by 2028. The whole point of the HS2 learning is you’re not supposed to do that, because that’s what leads you to make bad decisions.

But the House also says it understands that, at the time of the review, WYCA’s preferred alignment for a tram route between Leeds and Bradford involved running the tram on main roads,

because that would enable planning consent to be granted most quickly. But this would have caused significant disruption to traffic during construction, and would also not have enabled much new housing development compared with options which took the tram off-road.

A source familiar with the scheme said that by taking this approach, the mayor had been putting “political expediency in front of what’s probably in the best interests of taxpayers, bluntly”.

As I reported last month, even after the review, rail minister Lord (Peter) Hendy found it necessary to remind Brabin:

…  it is important to carefully consider the cost, effects and benefits/disbenefits of ‘street running’ vs utilising reserved track where available or running through brownfield land.

The House’s article also fleshes out more of the review’s scepticism around the WYCA’s insistence that mass transit means trams and not buses:

The review found there was a “clear mantra” among those working on the scheme that “the term WYMT is synonymous with ‘tram’” and that “anything less than” a tram would be considered “second-class”.

Nista said that while “it may be the case that trams are the right modal choice”, the review team were “concerned that the lack of unbiased thinking about the best solution for delivering the objectives has hampered the development of an evidence-based demonstration of the most effective and efficient scheme”.

It adds: “There is a need to build the case for trams which has not been completed. This is particularly important because the likely cost of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) mode is significantly less than for trams and the BRT benefits:cost ratio is significantly better.”

Staff working on the project told Nista that trams “will be transformational, more resilient and more acceptable to the public” than a bus network, but Nista asserted that “the evidence for this has not yet been developed”.

It may of course be that anything less than a tram would be considered second class and that trams will be more acceptable to the public, but the WYCA may equally be responsible for perpetuating these perceptions, putting spades in the ground merely to dig itself into a hole.