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”.
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:
The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network, published today, provides some explanation for the Department for Transport (DfT) telling National Highways to cut back its safety plan for the current (interim) year.
By way of a quick recap, I exclusively revealed that transport secretary Heidi Alexander told the company of which she is the sole owner to remove one action from its planned Safety Action Plan 2025-26. This was the HGV “know your zones” campaign. National Highways also curtailed two other road safety awareness campaigns.
All three had the expected impact of reducing serious casualties.
In its latest report, the ORR comments on National Highways’ Interim Delivery Plan, which included the safety plan:
As we reported last year, government mandated a reduction in budgets for communication campaigns in 2024, which resulted in National Highways scaling back some of its proposed activities.
There’s more good news, bad news on the rail ticketing front with Greater Anglia adding contactless technology to the 20 stations that were due to get it at the end of last year but which were put back to the summer.
But, although the delay isn’t as bad as it was predicted to be, the whole programme to spread Transport for London’s (TfL) pay as you go (PAYG) beyond London is still years behind and less than halfway complete.
Rather embarrassingly for rail minister Lord Hendy (who used to head TfL), he keeps saying the same thing about the upgrade being long overdue, even as he tries to sing its praises.
In November, it was announced that 50 stations would go live the following month – the first tranche of a second phase. Hendy said:
Rail ticketing is far too complicated and long overdue an upgrade to bring it into the 21st century.
PAYG contactless will be rolled out to a further 20 stations, including Stansted and Southend airports, on Greater Anglia route during Summer 2026 after issues were identified in testing.
These are the 20 stations that have now had the technology implemented. Hendy said:
Rail ticketing is long overdue an upgrade to bring the rail network into the 21st century.
He is surprisingly frank on this: the upgrade is long overdue and, as I reported in November, there is no target date for adding the remaining 130 stations.
Ministers have made headlines with the announcement that rail passengers will be able to claim Delay Repay compensation directly from third party retailers, but without saying anything about when it will happen.
Train Delay Repay rule changes to make claims easier
But the story begins:
Train travellers who buy discounted tickets using railcards will face additional checks, as part of a trial to crack down on ticketing fraud starting in April.
If the trial is successful, the plan will save £20m a year in lost revenue, while preventing confused passengers from being prosecuted for fare evasion, the Department for Transport says.
Followed by:
A separate scheme will also make it easier for passengers who buy their tickets from third-party retailers such as Trainline to claim compensation for late or cancelled services under the Delay Repay scheme.
The confusion is entirely the result of the Department for Transport bundling two slightly related announcements together.
The annual rise in the cost of the maintenance backlog on local roads as reported by the ALARM survey is guaranteed to get headlines but this year’s increase was predictable for reasons beyond inflation.
The cost of fixing all the potholes on local roads in England and Wales would be an estimated £18.6bn, the industry body that oversees road surfacing has warned.
Research from the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) found that just 51% of the local road network that is maintained by local councils were reported by those authorities to be in good condition.
The chairman of the group called it a “national disgrace”.
Heidi Alexander has cast new doubts over whether West Yorkshire’s plans for “mass transit” will ever amount to anything more than “a few better buses”, in what appears to be an ongoing battle between her department on one side and chancellor Rachel Reeves and mayor Tracy Brabin on the other.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has refused to guarantee that the planned West Yorkshire mass transit system will include a tram network.
It adds:
It comes after The Yorkshire Post revealed last year that civil servants could overrule Ms Brabin and turn the mass transit system into a bus network, with West Yorkshire Combined Authority asked to set out an alternative business case for buses. The Department for Transport is the ultimate body which will sign off the plans for the scheme.
It also comes after the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA), led by Brabin, refused to disclose a “peer review” of the scheme by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) on the grounds that it would damage public confidence in the scheme.
The Yorkshire Post article shows Alexander not only repeatedly refusing to commit to the trams that Brabin and Leeds MP Reeves have been pushing for but also refusing to back Reeves’ insistence that “mass transit does not mean a few better buses”:
Highways magazine has a story about council directors’ body ADEPT advising members to avoid using “Net Zero” in communications, which I find interesting as have never liked the phrase.
A new 10-point guide from council chiefs to help the public sector communicate more effectively about climate change suggests officers should avoid using common phrases like ‘net zero’ – despite the fact that the Government department involved in tackling the issue is itself called the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
An Introduction to Talking Climate was produced by council directors’ body ADEPT and Yorkshire & Humber Climate Commission and is based on ‘quantitative and qualitative research, surveying over 7,000 people and using focus groups to draw out strategic implications for policy and communication’.
The document is based on what are perceived to be the best ways to communicate with people and the struggle ‘to frame messages in ways that resonate with people’s everyday lives’.
Included in this list is net zero. The guide states: ‘Don’t use it in isolation or as shorthand; it’s a technical term and isn’t well understood.’
National Highways has effectively confirmed that it will halve the budget of its Driving for Better business campaign, which aims to reduce work‑related road risk.
Fleet News understands that details around the future funding of the road safety programme are included in a draft business plan submitted by National Highways in response to the Government’s draft Road Investment Strategy (RIS).
Sources suggest its annual budget will be halved from around £750,000 to £375,000 for the next financial year (2026/27).
It notes that:
Asked about the future of the Driving for Better Business campaign by Fleet News, National Highways wouldn’t be drawn on specifics, but said it remained “committed” to the programme.
A National Highways spokesperson added: “National Highways funding for this programme continues, but we are reviewing as part of developing our plans for the next ‘road period’.
“As with all our work, we regularly review to ensure we deliver the best value for taxpayer.”
The non-denial, the use of the word “committed”, and the reference to “the best value for taxpayer” (sic) all provide a strong indication that the story is true.
The transport secretary watered down National Highways’ plan to reduce deaths and serious injuries on its network, despite telling MPs that the plan set out “a series of safety improvements” that her department had required the company to deliver.
Heidi Alexander also misled MPs on the Transport Committee last April by presenting the plan as complete when it was still in draft form, despite the year that it covered already having begun.
In fact, she subsequently directed National Highways to remove one action from its 2025-26 Safety Action Plan, while the company shortened two others, for reasons that it has declined to explain.
According to the plan, all three actions had the “expected impact” of reducing killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties at a time when National Highways was expected to miss its official casualty reduction target.
The obvious implication of this is that watering down the plan will have led to more KSI casualties than if it had been implemented in full.
The revelations, which stem from my Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests and subsequent complaints to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), raise new questions about transparency at the Department for Transport (DfT), National Highways, and its regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).
Asked by Liberal Democrat MP Steff Aquarone whether she was “minded to make a specific direction” to the company, which was expected to miss its December 2025 KSI reduction target, she replied:
We have been clear with National Highways that it must deliver a series of safety improvements. It has set that out in its safety action plan for 2025‑26.
I then asked the DfT, National Highways and the ORR for the plan under FOI but all refused, claiming that it was exempt from disclosure as it was due to be published as part of National Highways’ delivery plan for the year. A watered down version of the plan was indeed published in July as Annex 7 to the delivery plan.
The ICO has now issued a decision notice on my complaint about the ORR, which discloses that at the time of my FOI request the ORR held various “draft” versions of the safety action plan:
ORR says that these “drafts included the final version” of the Interim Period Delivery Plan. National Highways (NH) submitted this to the Secretary of State for approval prior to publication and delivery.
However, ORR says that in its approval, the Secretary of State removed from the Safety Action Plan 2025-2026 one action that NH had previously proposed.
Ministers are still unable to give a date for the opening of the Department for Transport’s (DfT) mythical “Structures Fund”, nine months after announcing it.
Two written parliamentary answers from roads minister and serial information concealer Simon Lightwood used “in due course” – which translates as “we can’t/won’t tell you” – in relation to finding out even how the fund will work.
The Department for Transport surveyed local highway authorities and transport stakeholders on the assessment criteria for the Structures Fund in February 2026. We are currently considering the responses and will confirm the final prioritisation criteria in due course. Once these criteria are published, the Fund will be opened for investment proposals from local authorities, and the Department will then be able to confirm which, and how many, schemes are to receive funding from the Structures Fund.
Which is unfortunate because, when announcing the fund, transport secretary Heidi Alexander said:
Our structures fund will make long-overdue investments to repair ageing structures across the country…
Rather bafflingly, the DfT said:
Capital investment today will … address these immediate risks over the next five years.
Adding:
We will set out more detail about how funding will be allocated shortly.
When I say it’s a mythical fund it’s because I take the old-fashioned view that a fund isn’t really a fund unless you put money into it and the DfT still hasn’t said how much of the £1bn it announced last June, to be shared with local road upgrades, will be available for structures.
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