Tag: funding

• Mayor welcomes NPR funding cap

  I’ve been looking at one of the so-called “compact agreements” on how central government and northern mayors “will collaborate to deliver the next stage of Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR)” and wondering if it is less of an agreement and more of a collective whistling to keep their spirits up.

  

  For a start, the agreements in fact cover several future stages of NPR and that’s really the point as ministers have chosen to chop the project into chunks to be delivered consecutively.

  An then the agreement between transport secretary Heid Alexander, chancellor Rachel Reeves, communities secretary Steve Reed, and – last but not least – West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin opines:

  We welcome the £1.1bn funding allocated for NPR development in this Spending Review period, allowing development work for the first two phases to proceed without delay, and the certainty implied by the funding cap of £45bn for the overall NPR scheme, which will guide development and future delivery.

  So three cabinet ministers and one mayor, who is definitely not in a hostage situation, applaud a relatively small amount of development cash allocated by central government and a promise not to spend more than a specified amount, in place of substantive funding.

  The agreement goes on to explain:

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  2026.01.28

• Taxpayers to cough up even more for “privately funded” Thames Tunnel

  The Times story on the Lower Thames Crossing raises further doubts that the £11bn project will be privately financed, even beyond the £3bn that the taxpayer is due to put in before anything happens.

  The taxpayer is set to lose net income of at least £120 million a year as a result of the financial arrangements for a new road tunnel under the Thames, The Times can reveal.

  Government plans for the Lower Thames Crossing are built on handing the revenues from the existing tolls on the Dartford Crossing to a new private operator, which will be allowed to keep them in perpetuity.

  

  My take on this is that if you are diverting £120m of revenue annually and for ever to pay for a project, you are at least partially funding that project (again, beyond the £3bn) and no amount of smoke and mirrors can disguise that.

  The Times reports that:

  Under the Transport Act 2000, these revenues go directly to the DfT, not into the Treasury’s coffers, and must be used for improving transport. The DfT did not respond to TAN’s question as to whether this income would be “included in DfT’s future budgets as a loss” or if it had been factored into the cost-benefit analysis for the Lower Thames project. The DfT also declined to answer similar questions from The Times.

  This is clear obfuscation from the DfT but, whether the money is a hit to the transport budget or will be refunded by the Treasury, it’s taxpayers’ money.

  Elsewhere in the paper, the piece’s author, Alistair Osborne, comments

  …you’d think that before ministers committed £3.1 billion of taxpayer’s money and started early construction works, they might have bothered to produce a full business case for the link, instead of opting to wait until 2028. Or explained why it’s still a zippy scheme, despite it seeming to fail the DfT’s own “value for money” test. Or actually come clean about the implications of its “preferred financing option”, which would see both the crossing and existing taxpayer income transfer to a private sector owner in perpetuity.

  I made similar observations here last month.

  Having said that, the current revelations on the funding represent great work by TAN (Transport Action Network) and the journalist.

  2026.01.28

• Shelved but never paused: how the DfT hid defunding of A1 scheme

  The Department for Transport (DfT) has backtracked on its claim that a major National Highways road scheme that it secretly shelved was officially “paused” as a result, which explains why the government-owned company ran up a £70m bill for an “enhancement” that never happened.

  But there remains the scandal of how both National Highways and regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) lied to Parliament and the public by pretending that the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham was going ahead imminently, despite being defunded and deprioritised, and how the ORR falsely attributed a quarter-billion-pound to the shelved scheme.

  The story of the various deceptions perpetrated by these various bodies and how they destroy any pretence that the Road Investment Strategy (RIS) process allows transparency and oversight of National Highways’ enhancements programme is a long and complicated one.

  It begins with a Treasury decision to defund and deprioritise the scheme as part of the 2021 Spending Review (SR21).

  

  This decision was taken on value for money grounds in a context where National Highways was failing to spend its budget, meaning that the scheme could be afforded but was not cost effective.

  When National Highways became aware of the SR21 decisions, it interpreted them as meaning that the Morpeth to Ellingham scheme was “paused” and said in a February 2022 change control document sent to the DfT that this would be formalised through a separate change control document.

  The DfT has previously insisted that the first change control form formally paused the scheme, which was obviously untrue, but in any case on 31 March 2022 a senior National Highways official told the DfT’s Kate Cohen:

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  2026.01.20

• Regulator finds holes in Reeves’ pothole cash claims

  The government is having to backtrack on its big announcement about funding for council road maintenance in England “doubling” after I pointed out to the official statistics regulator that it was full of spin.

  My biggest problem with this Treasury Press release in November was that it failed to take inflation into account by stating whether the promised future increase will be in real terms or cash terms.

  Of course it’s in cash terms, which can always be used to make spending increases look bigger than they are in real terms.

  The Office for Statistics Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority agreed with this point and the Treasury has promised to be clearer in future.

  The other main trick that the spin doctors pulled was to compare two individual financial years that were five years apart, i.e. 2024-25 (the last funding settlement determined by the Tories) and 2029-30.

  This meant a degree of cherry picking and using a previous figure rather as a comparator, rather than what would have been spent.

  

  Note that chancellor Rachel Reeves said:

  We are doubling the funding promised by the previous government

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  2026.01.19

• Full of holes

  The mixed messages coming from the latest Department for Transport (DfT) press release on English local authority approaches to road maintenance are mind-blowing, with the idea that prevention is better than cure getting lost in simplistic headlines.

  How well is your council fixing your roads?

  New map rates how record government pothole funding is being used.

  

  Absent from the top line is the idea that fixing roads and filling in potholes is a sign of failure.

  • new red, amber, green ratings let public see which local highway authorities are fixing potholes effectively
  • government’s record £7.3 billion funding announced at budget is helping councils get on with fixing nation’s roads
  • record investment will drive real improvement, saving drivers money by preventing costly repairs and restoring pride in communities

  The press release explains that red, amber, green (RAG) ratings are based on three key areas:

  • the condition of local roads
  • how much LHAs are spending on road repairs
  • whether they are following best practice in maintaining highways

  Eventually, the DfT gets around to explaining what they mean by best practice, and it isn’t “patching up potholes”:

  Those that scored ‘green’, like Leeds, Sandwell and Manchester, were able to demonstrate they are following best practice, such as investing in more long-term preventative measures rather than just patching up potholes, while also maintaining good road conditions and investing significantly into improving local roads. 

  Despite all the tough talk, the DfT has created a system of perverse incentives, where the councils with a red rating get *more* money.

  2026.01.12

• Look over there, Greenwood says as active travel funding falls

  With Labour cutting funding for active travel and being coy about whether its forthcoming cycling and walking investment strategy (CWIS3) will include meaningful targets, transport minister Lilian Greenwood has gone in for the diversionary tactic of reheating the culture wars.

  On Sunday The Guardian reported pressure from campaigners for CWIS3 to include targets beyond the feeble – and clearly unmeasurable – aspiration to make walking, wheeling and cycling “easy, safe, and accessible for everyone” by 2035.

  

  On Wednesday, Greenwood answered – or rather failed to answer – a question from shadow transport secretary Richard Holden on:

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  2025.12.12

• MPs back backwater buses boost

  The Commons Transport Committee has welcomed the news that government funding to local authorities for bus services will take into account how rural an area is for the first time

  Although the committee described the news as an “announcement” by the Department for Transport, it was a little bit buried in a larger announcement last week of the consolidation of various existing bus funding streams into capital and revenue Local Authority Bus Grant (LABG) totalling nearly £3bn over four years.

  The webpage for LABG revenue allocations: 2026 to 2029 states:

  The individual revenue allocations were determined using a revised 2025 to 2026 formula that considered the needs of each local transport authority, taking into account population size, levels of deprivation, bus service provision and rurality. 

  

  The committee raised the issue of rural buses in its Buses connecting communities report, published in August.

  Chair Ruth Cadbury said: 

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  2025.12.10

• Smoke and mirrors on bus funding

  Ministers have announced what they are branding a “3bn boost for buses” but, as is happening increasingly often these days, it’s a continuation of existing funding – and possibly a cut – dressed up as new money.

  The good news is that:

  Multi-year funding gives local authorities the funds they need to provide passengers with lower fares, more frequent and reliable services and safer journeys.

  

  Basically, the Department for Transport (DfT) has consolidated a number of existing funding streams such as Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIP) cash and Local Authority Bus Service Operators Grant (BSOG) into capital and revenue Local Authority Bus Grant (LABG).

  It looks as if the funding for the £3 bus fare cap (which is short-term) is separate and, in the short term, it looks like revenue funding is lower next year than this.

  Cash for zero emission buses is also (I think) separate.

  But with funding going through city regions, it’s often hard to work this out.

  The DfT also seems to be doing quite a lot of rounding up: to get to £3bn

  Almost £700 million of funding will be allocated to local authorities every single year up to 2028 to 2029 and can be spent however they want.

  It’s worth remembering that Boris Johnson also promised a “£3 billion bus revolution” back in the days when £3bn was a lot of money.

  2025.12.05

• Thames Tunnel hole gets bigger

  The Financial Times has picked up on the spiralling costs of the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), as well as the huge sums that we will all be putting in, before private finance comes riding over the hill.

  Taxpayers will contribute more than £3bn to the Lower Thames Crossing despite ministers’ plans to seek private finance for the most expensive new highway in British history.

  The cost of the project, the first wholly new crossing across the river Thames to the east of London in 60 years, has risen from an estimate of between £5.3bn and £6.8bn in 2017 to almost £11bn, the Treasury has confirmed.

  

  The first figure, the £3bn of public money, may be news to some people but it is simply adding £1.2bn of historic costs to the £1.8bn that the Treasury has allocated across this financial year and the next three, including nearly a billion in last week’s Budget.

  But the cost increase to a current price tag of £11bn means a big rise in the part that the government is hoping to get private finance to contribute, to get them into a hole on a project that is otherwise unaffordable.

  The government hopes it will secure about £7.5bn of private capital, up from a figure of £6.3bn set out in March by National Highways, the public body responsible for the scheme between Kent and Essex.

  Predictably, Transport Action Network (TAN) has condemned the “utterly predictable” news, which it says will lead to significantly higher tolls being charged at the existing Dartford Crossing and the LTC.

  TAN has previously calculated that tolls at Dartford could triple to pay for the LTC. Director Chris Todd said:

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  2025.12.03

• Reeves seeks more spin for her buck

  With Rachel Reeves under fire for her pre-Budget spin, it’s worth another look at how misleading her claims were about the post-Budget announcement of local highways maintenance funding for the last four years of the Parliament.

  The unfortunate thing is, Labour is (for now) giving councils the funding boost and medium-term certainty they need, but mangling the message.

  There is a significant – and positive – emphasis on councils doing preventative treatments, which takes the emphasis away from filling potholes in the short term but should mean there are fewer to fill later on.

  This may explain why, as I have said, Reeves again misstated the Labour manifesto pledge to fix a million extra potholes for every year of the Parliament, now only talking about doing so by the end of the period.

  

  But (according to the Treasury press release) she also said:

  We are doubling the funding promised by the previous government

  This is, I am afraid to say, doubly misleading, as the small print in the press release explains that it compares:

  £1.067bn funding allocated by the previous Government for FY2024/25, to £2.134bn funding allocated by this Government for FY2029/30

  So, firstly, it isn’t money promised by the Tories but actually allocated.

  And this confirms that the claim is based on two years that are five years apart and therefore subject to inflation.

  The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has published Regulatory guidance on intelligent transparency, which states:

  (more…)

  2025.12.01