Transport Insights

Contrary to (my) expectations, the Government has now published the Highways (Financing) Bill, which provides for even more public assets to be privatised, destroying Andy Burnham’s promise to be “relentless” in giving people “ownership and control”.

I had thought that a very recent statement that the Bill would be published “when Parliamentary time allows” meant that it would not be appearing any time soon – or why make such a statement about a bill in the King’s Speech, but the Bill was in fact introduced to the House of Commons and given its First Reading yesterday with Second Reading on 15 October.

Aside from setting up the private funding mechanism for building the Lower Thames Crossing, the Bill will facilitate the transfer of the Dartford Crossings – and their revenue – to the same private entity.

It’s probably best to set this out in terms of the explanatory notes:

The Highways (Financing) Bill (“the Bill”) establishes a statutory framework to enable private sector investment to construct, operate, maintain and improve new and existing strategic road infrastructure through a Regulated Asset Base (“RAB”) model and for private companies to act as a Highway Authority for that infrastructure.

And, somewhat mealy-mouthed:

The main provisions, needed to establish the RAB model, will:

[…]

provide transfer schemes to allow property, rights and liabilities to be transferred between the Secretary of State strategic highways companies, licence holders and other appropriate persons in connection with the licensing regime established by the Act.

Make no mistake: this is privatisation. And the notes make explicitly clear that the Government believes that giving away a public asset and its rights to collect tolls is “needed to establish the RAB model”.

This means they don’t think they can get private finance to build the LTC without a huge amount of public funding being diverted from the DfT to a private body.

By way of a reminder, the PM said last week:

The government I lead will be relentless in giving people and places what they were promised 10 years ago, ownership and control.

Not so relentless after all. It seems that Burnham is as happy to seen public assets privatised as Starmer and Reeves were.

The obvious contradiction, the earlier failure to set a date for the Bill, and the qualification “at this stage” made me think that a rethink was being carried out. I was, it seems, very wrong.

In fact, the DfT’s recent response is almost word-for-word what roads minister Simon Lightwood said in February.

As a former PM once said, “nothing has changed”. Privatisation remains Labour policy.