Author’s Note: On the 20th of February, the British Institute of Global Affairs was honoured to have been invited to attend the ‘Unconference: Building the Transport of the Future’. The event was hosted in Leeds by Civic Future and Britain Remade, organisations aiming to encourage civic leadership and to “make it easier for Britain to build things” respectively. We thank them for inviting us and for inspiring this week’s commentary piece.
In 1880, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Manchester opened its doors to its Central Station. Designed by Sir John Fowler, it served as a railway terminus for nearly 90 years before being shut. The Grade II listed building would then re-open in 1982, just over a century after its first opening, as a music concert venue. Since then, it has also doubled as a conference centre and a field hospital for COVID patients.
On the 4th October, 2023, 143 years after its opening and just under 200 years after the first public railway was opened, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak used this conference centre to cancel plans for HS2 – Britain’s attempt at a high-speed rail network. There is something exasperatingly British about being the country that invented the train only to have such poor trains but to announce the closure of an already-failed transport policy in an old railway station is almost taunting in its symbolism.
When the topic of transport comes up in everyday conversation, it seems as though everyone has some intelligent insight into how to fix a broken system. Everyone can agree that the UK transport is bad; most people can point to a European country that they’d like us to emulate; and a lot of people have anecdotes that seemingly provide a fix. The ‘unconference’ put on by Civic Future and Britain Remade, however, attempted to do something more than lament what is by providing a genuine platform for what could be.
The event brought together civil servants, Parliamentary assistants, local councillors, students, and transport experts/planners with decades of experience. After some mingling, the evening started with everyone throwing out their priorities and big concerns when it came to transport. These were then divided up into nine key discussions with three time slots. This is to say that participants had a choice of three topics and at the end of each 30 minutes, they had three new topics to pick from.
The Lessons
There were a lot of interesting points that were raised, anecdotes that offered genuine pearls of wisdom, and throwaway comments that had the potential for recycling. Without wanting to provide minutes for the event, these were my big takeaways:
1. The state of our development system
The UK’s approach to developing transport – whether buses, trains, trams, or other – is absolutely and unapproachably byzantine. Each decision is a labyrinth of regulation, department oversight, lobbying interests, NIMBY (“Not-In-My-Back-Yard”) paperwork, and suing.
One anecdote that was raised came from Portishead. The council wanted to re-open (emphasis: re-open, not create) three miles of railway to create a shorter train journey to Bristol. In order to meet the approval of various departments and regulation, the local council had to submit an application that was just shy of 80,000 pages long (79,187 pages to be exact). For some context, my Master’s thesis was 97 pages long and most academic books approach the 500 page mark. Of that 80,000, 18,000 were devoted to an ’environmental statement’ covering bat technical appendices (1,174 pages), newts (215), and vegetation management (1,810 pages). That’s around twelve Master’s theses on bats alone. Not only that, but it then required 3 years of waiting to gain approval. The report, if spread out on the ground, would have covered around 15 miles. For 3 miles of already-available track.
A participant in this particular meeting added to this anecdote his experience of a ‘PDF-ocracy’ where each department and regulatory body doesn’t quite know what the system does, but having sent off a PDF of their own, they can rest easy knowing that they have ticked an item off the to-do list and have done their part. In a fact rich with irony, much of this comes down to our adoption of EU regulation. Yet, where countries such as Poland and Spain opted to pick a more minimalistic interpretation of the EU’s framework, the UK adopted such a generous approach that nothing is functionally achievable.
The discussion of regulation, legislation, and development did raise a question I found to be important: who exactly does what?
2. Devolution and Development
Who does what? It’s a question at the very heart of politics, but it also translates very practically into the decisions of every day life. When it comes to transport, do we allow local authorities to come up with local solutions to local problems? Or do we need a central idea of how to fix a national issue surrounding transport? While these questions were floating around, it struck me that there was a key distinction to be made: Design and Delivery.
Devolution and transport planning isn’t just an argument about who makes decisions, it’s about who comes up with the ideas and who implements them. For example, should local authorities design the local transport they want before getting funding and support from central government? Should it design local transport and have the tax-raising powers to fund it itself? Or should central government set the nation’s transport goals but leave it to local powers to figure out the delivery?
Nowhere else did these questions apply so neatly as to the final discussion:
3. Nationalising the railways
This last conversation was a fun one. The group of us decided to organise ourselves debate-style and the arguments that came forward hit on all the classics of A-Level politics. From Friedman to natural monopolies, the arguments went back and forth. One witty contributor pointed out that the UK does, in fact, have state-owned railway operators working in the UK. Just not our state. Avanti is owned by Italy; the freight company Deutsche-Bahn is unsurprisingly owned by Germany; and the Elizabeth Line is owned by Hong Kong. Everyone else knows that it’s a good idea to have a state-owned railway, so why not us?
Another point that was raised was that there isn’t a difference between public or private ownership: neither is significantly more efficient or effective, which belies the argument of private-ownership.
The discussion ended with talk of an overly-large state taking on too much responsibility and where exactly the funding can come from. Having recently finished Gordon Brown’s Permacrisis, it struck me that the fact we were recycling A-Level arguments is an example of why these events are so important. The possibilities of public-private partnerships are there if we have the willingness to consider them.
Final Thoughts
If there was anything that I took away from the event, it was that Britain makes life harder for itself. We end up wasting time and losing the ability to invest energy in the creative, intersectional thinking that connects transport to health and social care, to biodiversity, and to community. While our current championing of biodiversity is laudable, our broken and overly-bureaucratic system holds us back from real development; creates a divide between our values and our interests that doesn’t need to be there; and ultimately, doesn’t work. Despite such byzantine regulation that aims to protect the sacred newt, our biodiversity levels have in-fact fallen.
I started this commentary pointing out that despite being the country that invented the train, we have a pitiable railway system. We still have the capacity for creativity and innovation that created wonders like the train, we just need to give them the space and energy to flourish. This event took place in Leeds – the city that invented the electric tram in fact. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t operate any.
Be sure to explore the work of Civic Future and Britain Remade. For more on Britain Remade’s transport ideas, take a look at their recent report ‘Back on Track’.