Tag: dft

• Private firm’s train order takes GBR hype to new heights

  One of the things that irritates me about over-hyped government announcements, particularly from Labour, is the way that the hype provides cover for not doing very much while pretending to do a lot. The latest ludicrous announcement from the Department for Transport (DfT) is one of the most egregious pieces of hype it has delivered for a while.

  A press release announces:

  New British-built trains to transform railways and reindustrialise Britain
  

  faster and more frequent train journeys across the North as government supports a £1 billion investment in 29 new British-built trains on Great British Railways (GBR)

  So you are saying that a purchase of just 29 trains will simultaneously transform the railways and reindustrialise the whole country?

  Not only that but

  The new fleet of 29 battery-electric TransPennine Express trains, set to be built at Derby’s historic Litchurch Lane Works, is a clear example of what Great British Railways can deliver by bringing track and train together.

  And:

  Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, said:
  
  “It’s exactly what Great British Railways is all about – taking back control of the basics and getting Britain believing again.”

  

  This is (or should be) a routine purchase by a private rolling stock company, with its own (borrowed) money, from a private, largely foreign-owned train builder, with the stock then leased to a train operator.

  This model has been in place for decades, with the state’s contribution being to underwrite the train operator’s revenue. It has nothing to do with Great British Railways bringing track and train together; in fact, the DfT is largely responsible for the longstanding procurement gaps and loss of capability that this order begins to address.

  The only thing that has changed is that the train operator is now publicly owned.

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  2026.09.11

• Is a Thames tunnel U-turn on the way?

  A response from the Department for Transport on the question of whether it is really going to privatise a major public asset as part of its plan for the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC) suggests that the penny has dropped that it is incompatible with Andy Burnham’s promise to give people more “ownership and control”.

  Officials have suddenly slipped the phrase “at this stage” into what otherwise appears to be a doubling down on the choice of the Regulated Asset Base (RAB) model, under which ownership and operations of the Dartford Crossings would transfer to a new regulated private sector entity.

  When you look at the scheme’s Accounting Officer Assessment, the choice of the RAB model looks pretty decisive:

  The project is affordable on the basis of the regulated asset base (RAB) model
  
  The decision that the LTC will be taken forward on the basis of the RAB model
  
  The RAB model is the only current option that is judged to sufficiently meet the government’s strategic objective
  
  The decision to … take forward the RAB model as the government’s preferred financing model

  As for as I can see, the DfT has not previously used “at this stage” when describing the financing model for the £10bn+ project.

  

  It has now:

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  2026.09.10

• Spring, summer, autumn: Councils still in the dark over zombie schemes

  Now that the summer is officially over, I have returned to the issue of the zombie local road schemes that appeared in the spring not to have survived a review – and it appears that promises to clarify their status in “the summer” have not been honoured.

  The story starts with a review of Major Road Network and Large Local Majors (MRN/LLM) programme announced last year, which led to the announcement in March that 16 schemes “will progress”, leaving 26 effectively, but not officially scrapped.

  As I have reported, the DfT said that these schemes were still under review, with a decision expected “later in the summer”.

  But now it’s September.

  Wiltshire Council told me that it has not heard anything further about its funding bid for the A350 Melksham bypass, while Gloucestershire CC seems to have picked up that the can had been kicked further down the road.

  

  In July it indicated that it was going to carry on progressing its scheme for new M5 junction and a bypass for the A46 near Tewkesbury, including spending more public money on it, but noted that the government funding was still uncertain. A paper to its Cabinet stated:

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  2026.09.04

• DfT accused of “state-sponsored gaslighting” over Thames tunnel

  The government seems to have dug itself into a very big hole in an attempt to bury the outline business case (OBC) for the Lower Thames Crossing, a document that was the basis for a decision to take total public funding for the “privately-funded” tunnel to £3.1bn.

  As I reported last month:

  A new report from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) has shown how the Department for Transport is playing fast and loose with public money over the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC) – and basically lying to avoid releasing the mega-project’s business case.

  This relates to a Freedom of Information/Environmental Information Regulations request for the OBC from Becca Lush of Transport Action network, which the DfT refused on the grounds that the document was “in draft”.

  

  Lush had already sought an internal review of this claim when I pointed out that:

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  2026.08.25

• Road investment planning goes out the window

  I have three stories and a commentary piece in the latest issue of Local Transport Today, with the connecting theme being that neither the government nor National Highways are covering themselves in glory when it comes to planning capital spending on England’s roads.

  The main angle of a piece (also on TransportXtra) on the various reports on National Highways that get published at this time of year is that the company isn’t in the best shape to deliver an expanded renewals programme as the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS3) begins.

  National Highways must improve its governance to ensure the efficient delivery of the new Road Investment Strategy (RIS3), the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has stated.

  The regulator criticised the company for not taking full advantage of the opportunities to get ready for RIS3, “meaning there is an increased risk to delivery”, and called for it to demonstrate how it will strengthen its planning and controls to manage the higher level of funding and activity.

  

  A comment piece alongside this story notes the continuing movement of goalposts on what National Highways is supposed to deliver under the RIS framework, including ministers shelving two major schemes within months of the document being published.

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  2026.07.31

• Schrödinger’s road scheme, Schrödinger’s business case

  A new report from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) has shown how the Department for Transport is playing fast and loose with public money over the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC) – and basically lying to avoid releasing the mega-project’s business case.

  Highways magazine reports that, in terms of NISTA’s Delivery Confidence Assessment in its Annual Report 2025/2026:

  None of the Department for Transport’s (DfT) highways projects were rated red; however, the £10bn Lower Thames Crossing and the £1.5bn A66 Northern Trans-Pennine scheme did slip into amber.

  But, as Highways notes, the LTC’s Senior Responsible Owner (the DfT’s Kate Cohen) decided that the project should be bumped up to a green rating.

  

  Her commentary on its DCA states:

  Compared to financial year 24/25 Q4, the SRO Delivery Confidence Assessment (DCA) rating at 25/26 Q4 improved from Amber to Green.
  […]
  The NISTA DCA rating for 25/26 Q4 is Amber, whilst we recognise that there are still risks to delivery, the SRO is content that sufficient mitigations were in place as of March-26 and therefore rated the DCA as Green. The project DCA is reviewed monthly. The Outline Business Case was updated and approved by the DfT Investment Committee in October 2025. This marks the transition from full public sector funding to a future private sector RAB model, with the private sector to deliver the remainder of the scheme and take on Dartford Crossing operations in 2028.

  The statement that the private sector operator will take on Dartford Crossing operations – and revenue – in 2028, as it starts construction, is the first time that this has been stated explicitly.

  It means that the state will be putting in (even more) public funding from the outset, again giving the lie to the claim that this is privately financed.

  And this also (again) gives the lie to the DfT’s claim that outline business case that it has refused to release is in “draft form”.

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  2026.07.15

• DfT sets new record for hype

  The statistics regulator is to have a very quiet word with the people at the Department for Transport (DfT) who have a habit of making up claims of “record” funding but, as usual with regulators, the touch is so light as to be almost intangible.
  
  I grassed the DfT up to the Office for Statistics Regulation over this claim in a press release about £3m funding to help councils with bus franchising:

  local authorities are already using record government funding to introduce schemes such as discounted and free fares, as well as new services to previously unserved rural areas

  which was repeated by minister Simon Lightwood.

  

  And this one in a press release about the mythical structures fund:

  a record £1 billion total package to enhance England’s roads

  Bizarrely, the DfT told me that

  the minister’s quote refers to the fact that this is the first time ever that multi-year bus settlement have been provided to all local transport authorities

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  2026.05.08

• How Labour factionalism got us to Better Connected

  In a piece that is mainly about the Mandelson scandal, Tom Clark of Prospect addresses the factionalism at the top of government that led to the resignation of the previous transport secretary, Louise Haigh.
  
  You will remember that No 10 put the knife into Haigh by leaking the news of a trivial conviction relating to a mobile phone to a friendly (Tory) Newspaper.
  
  It was obvious that Haigh was far too radical on transport policy for the right wingers in No 10 under the then chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and that her defenestration was intended to allow someone like the more driver-friendly Heidi Alexander to take over.
  
  In a piece titled The Mandelson saga is really about Labour factionalism, Clark argues that Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson “shows how rule-by-clique dominates his party”.

  He notes that fired Foreign Office mandarin Olly Robbins revealed that Number 10 had enquired about an ambassadorship for former press chief Matthew Doyle, “another veteran partisan of the right in Labour’s internecine wars”.

  

  Regarding Haigh in particular, he adds:

  To grasp the zealotry of Labour’s ruling clique, compare the cavalier disregard for convention in advancing Mandelson and, potentially, Doyle, with the stance applied to Starmer’s first transport secretary, Louise Haigh. Haigh was widely seen as a success in her job, but never regarded as “one of us”. Before becoming a frontbencher, Haigh had judged she had better fill Starmer in on an embarrassing old conviction – albeit one so minor the court had left her unpunished – regarding a company mobile phone. Someone or other dug this detail out of a desk draw and handed it to the Times, before it was decided the story had become such a distraction that Haigh would have to go.

  Haigh was resigned just after launching a call for ideas on an integrated national transport strategy.
  
  She said of the strategy:

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  2026.04.22

• DfT stretches £1bn for local roads into “record” funding

  The Department for Transport (DfT) has doubled down on its refusal to reveal how much money is in its so-called “Structures Fund” for “fixing” bridges, flyovers and tunnels on English local authority roads.
  
  By way of a recap, all it is saying is that the fund shares £1bn (implicitly up to 2029-30) with local authority road upgrades, another funding stream that is likely to be very heavily oversubscribed.
  
  As I have pointed out, not only does the absence of dedicated funding call into question whether it should be called a fund at all, but the fact that some structures on the local authority network already get upgrade funding when they need “fixing” calls into question whether a discrete fund – as opposed to a statement of priorities – is even necessary.
  
  What we do know is that, unlike other local road upgrades, funding for structures is currently a one-off under the 2025 Spending Review and councils have a limited window this spring to put in bids.

  Funding decisions will be announced in Autumn 2026, with all successful schemes required to complete works by March 2030.

  The DfT has suggested to me that it may be able to say how much is in the fund when funding decisions are announced, which is in some ways a statement of the obvious, as we could tot up all the individual allocations.
  
  The department has also said that:

  A local contribution must be included in the submission. No minimum local contribution to costs has been set, however proposals with a higher contribution will be assessed positively.

  

  This means that the DfT could fit its contribution within a set budget, if it exists, by adjusting local authority contributions.
  
  It has been suggested to me by someone who knows about this sort of thing that the DfT may be keeping the size of the pot under wraps so as neither to give the impression that it is not worth applying or to suggest that it will fund any old scheme.
  
  The DfT has said it expects the “fund” to be oversubscribed, which would of course suit it because:

  Details of schemes that do not receive a funding award will be retained by the department in support of building the evidence base for investing in local highways structures in the future.

  This implicitly means post-2030 under a future spending review.
  
  With the DfT pointing out that…

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  2026.04.22

• All structure and no funding?

  The launch of the Structures Fund today comes with the usual mix of hype and a lack of detail, with the continued failure to confirm that the fund has dedicated funding again strengthening doubts that it actually exists.

  From the fanfare that the Department for Transport has given the fund in a press release headed “fixing the foundations”, you would think it has solved the problem:

  Government is backing councils across England to fix crumbling bridges, failing flyovers and deteriorating tunnels as the new Structures Fund opens today in the latest move to back drivers.

  Decades of neglected infrastructure have led to weight-restricted crossings adding miles to everyday journeys and deteriorating flyovers, leaving communities unsure when the next closure will come. The new fund will put money directly into the hands of councils to tackle the most pressing cases they cannot afford to fix alone.

  The fund is now open for bids and will inject cash into repairing critical structures across England, ensuring transport infrastructure is more resilient to extreme weather, while making everyday journeys safer, smoother and more dependable.

  The phrase “across England” – used twice – is typical PR language to make it look as if the funding will be universal, where as we are very much back to the bad old days of competitive bidding, with the reality being that money will be put into the hands of *some* councils and some journeys will improve.

  

  Always happy to go along with the hype, transport secretary Heidi Alexander is reported to have said:

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  2026.04.15