Transport Insights

I’ve had a go at comparing the “Local Transport Grant” set out in last week’s Spending Review with what English councils outside city region settlements – particularly North and Midlands councils – would have got under the Tories’ Local Transport Fund (LTF), which promised local transport authorities in those two regions £4.7bn over seven years from 2025.

In January, I revealed that the new government had effectively ditched the LTF, which was part of the Tories’ widely ridiculed Network North plan for the cash saved by curtailing HS2.

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Yesterday I looked at the announcement of a £1bn structures fund, with £590m going towards the Lower Thames Crossing and the rest for “broken bridges, ruined roads and tired tunnels” on England’s local road network.

There wasn’t much detail then but there is a bit more now.

The new cash will be over the period covered by the Spending Review, which is 2026-27 to 2029-30 for capital funding.

That is obviously around £100m a year.

What we don’t yet have is how it fits in with the £24bn capital funding for strategic and local roads in England over the same period.

At the time or writing, the media are carrying reports that chancellor Rachel Reeves has “awarded” the Lower Thames Crossing another £590m but no announcement has been published by the Treasury, the Department for Transport or National Highways.

This is the way the government manipulates the media these days, sending out press releases to favoured outlets with quotes that no-one actually said and no detail, very much discouraging questions about how it will work in practice.

The BBC reports that: “It came as part of a £1bn package to improve transport infrastructure across England, announced on Monday.”:

Except that no £1bn package has been announced. If it has, where is the detail?

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Labour appears to have dropped the Tory target of 300,000 public chargepoints for EVs by 2030, as well as its own pledge to set new “binding targets”.

That’s reading between the lines of a Department for Transport (DfT) press release, which says the government is “set to” roll out 100,000 chargepoints in England, “in the coming years” and makes no mention of the 300,000 target.

In fact, the DfT now says “tens of thousands of chargepoints” will be installed by 2030.

The 300,000 by 2030 target, which applies to the UK as a whole, was in the Tories’ March 2022  electric vehicle infrastructure strategy, which has not been withdrawn.

In its 2023 Plan for the Automotive Sector, Labour said the Tory government was “on course to miss its aim of having 300,000 public chargers available by 2030 by a decade”, which it said “will leave drivers fighting over available chargepoints.”

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There was very little detail about capital funding for roads in England in Wednesday’s Spending Review, which covers the four-years from 2026-27 to 2029-30 as far as capital is concerned:

National Highways’ interim settlement for 2025-26 is £4.8bn of which £3.4bn is capital, while capital funding for local road maintenance in England is “nearly £1.6 billion”, according to the Department for Transport, which includes £500m of additional funding announced in the October Budget.

So, the £6bn annual average announced yesterday is on the face of it higher than the current approximately £5bn, but might get eaten away by inflation.

And then there is the vague phrase “to…improve…local roads”. There are various other capital funding streams for local road enhancements, including what was called the Major Roads Fund – large local majors and the major road network.

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This new blog from freelance journalist Chris Ames will bring you all the news that’s unfit to print from UK and transport sectors, covering the stories behind the stories you may see elsewhere and calling out some of the spin and misrepresentation, as well as bringing exclusives from my own investigations.

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