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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
As I reported, the Budget deliberately held back details of this cash to allow a new announcement, stating at the time only that there would be “over £2 billion” in 2029-30.
The cash will gradually ramp up, from £1,617m next year to £2,134m with the largest increase around a quarter of a billion pounds coming in the final year.
The Department for Transport (DfT) said that “as the case in 2025 to 2026, a portion of this funding will be designated as incentive funding”. This ranges from £525m next year to £540m.
This funding will be subject to local highway authorities demonstrating that they comply with best practice in highways maintenance, for example, by spending all the Department for Transport’s capital grant on highways maintenance and adopting more preventative maintenance.
The DfT said that at least 25% of the extra cash will be dependent on local highway authorities publishing transparency reports. Rather confusingly, it said all incentive funding will be withheld if reports are not published.
The DfT said that in 2026-27, (a further) 50% of the incentive funding will be subject to local highways authorities’ performance.
I’ve previously raised the question about whether the government is putting sufficient cash into our transport networks to fund climate change adaption, with ministers often just saying they are putting in more money rather than asserting that it’s enough.
But a new written parliamentary answer from transport minister Keir Mather doesn’t even bother to address the question of whether there will be more money.
Asked by Sarah Dyke, Liberal Democrat MP for Glastonbury and Somerton:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, if she will provide additional funding to help mitigate ongoing soil moisture deficit effects for railway companies.
Mather gave a long and rambling reply on behalf of Heidi Alexander that began with a description of the problem…
The Department for Transport funds Network Rail to operate, maintain, and develop the nation’s railway infrastructure. As the climate changes, we expect to see hotter, drier summers, and therefore we will expect to encounter more instances of soil moisture deficit.
The Treasury has insisted that the Labour government remains committed to fixing an extra million potholes across England in each year of the Parliament, despite some very contradictory language in yesterday’s Budget document.
And it looks as if funding for local authority highway maintenance may be restored to this year’s level to do this, with a funding announcement deliberately held back to get new headlines.
Yesterday I noted that the Treasury’s official Budget document had redefined Labour’s manifesto commitment as “to fix an additional 1 million potholes per year by the end of the Parliament”, rather than every year along the way
However, a Treasury spokesperson has told me that the “every year” commitment remains intact.
I also noted, correctly, that none of the Budget documents had stated what funding would be for the years between now and 2029-30, when the commitment is over £2bn annually.
This year’s funding is around £1.6bn, which is said to include an “uplift” of £500m on base funding of £500m.
It looks as if Rachel Reeves has dropped the £500m “uplift” for local road maintenance (in England) and Labour appears to have ditched its manifesto pledge to “additional one million potholes across England in each year of the next parliament”.
By 2029-30, the government will commit over £2 billion annually for local authorities to repair, renew and fix potholes on their roads – doubling funding since coming into office. This record level of funding will enable the government to exceed its manifesto commitment to fix an additional 1 million potholes per year by the end of the Parliament.
So the extra million potholes a year have been put back from every year of the Parliament to the last year of the Parliament, i.e. 2029-30.
Despite promises of long-term funding settlements, the Budget document does not appear to give a total funding figure for 2026-27 or any year between now and 2029-30.
And the extra £500m that went into 2025-26 allocations with great fanfare in last year’s Budget is not trumpeted today, suggesting that it has gone.
The “doubling” claim is dubious as it does not take five years’ worth of inflation into account but concentration on 2029-30 suggests that the next few years will be bleak.
The Budget document also states:
The implementation of eVED will provide revenues for this new higher level of roads maintenance funding to be continued for the long term.
The focus on what happens at the end of the parliament reliance on eVED, which begins in 2028, again supports the idea that money will be tight in the meantime.
The Department for Transport’s Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL) wobbles around for the next four years from about £23bn to a bit over £24bn but it’s impossible within that to pick out highway maintenance funding.
The transport secretary has declined to say that she is confident that Network Rail has the funds to keep the railway safe as landslips hit the rail and road networks, driven by climate change.
Appearing before the Transport Committee, Heidi Alexander was asked by Rebecca Smith, Conservative MP for South West Devon, if she was
confident that Network Rail has the resources to safely maintain the railway network during this control period.
Her reply emphasized that spending has gone up, which it has, rather than answering what is the real question:
We are spending more money in Control Period 7 on activities to address improving resilience connected to weather and climate change. So climate change adaptation, I guess, is the phrase that I’m searching for. So in Control Period 7, we’re spending 2.6 billion, which is significantly more than we were spending in Control Period 6. So I think it’s right that the Network Rail are doing that because they are very alive to the challenges that changing weather patterns have for the rail network.
Smith had referenced a recent incident in Cumbria, i.e. the derailment of a train caused by a landslip onto the track. The Rail Accident Investigation Branch has said its preliminary examination found that a drainage channel running across the slope above the washed-out material, was unable to accommodate the volume of water present, saturating the material and initiating the landslip.
But, as this BBC report points out in a detailed piece that looks at the wider issue, that was followed by a landslip affecting the A592 in the region, which Westmorland and Furness Council said could be closed for months. After Storm Desmond in 2015, the nearby A591 was blocked by landslips that both blocked the road and washed its base away.
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