By Mark Smulian
2 March 2011
The government should publish a white paper on how transport investment will promote economic growth, MPs have said.
The call came from the Commons transport select committee today, which warned in its Transport and the economy report that abolition of England’s regional development agencies had left a void in decision-making on transport projects below national scale.
Chair Louise Ellman said the abolition of RDAs had ‘created a vacuum that has left regions without the institutions and arrangements they need to plan and prioritise sub-national transport schemes and other significant transport infrastructure’.
She said the government hoped that groups of local enterprise partnerships – the successors to RDAs – would fill the gap, but many LEPs ‘are either barely formed or have yet to be established’.
A white paper is needed, the report says, to clarify government objectives for all transport spending and the criteria to be used for deciding between different claims on resources.
It also urges the government to rethink the Department for Transport’s ‘New Approach To Appraisal’ process, used to test value for money, which the committee felt had caused disproportionate cuts in small local sustainable transport works.
Matthew Lugg, vice-president of the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transportation, told Public Finance he empathised with the committee’s concerns.
He said: ‘There is a vacuum because the LEPs are small geographically compared with the RDAs and clearly transport operates in a regional context.
‘There is now an inability to decide on regional or even sub-regional issues, and there is a need for something there because there is a lot of uncertainty over how transport will be funded.’
A DfT spokesman said: ‘We believe that ending the era of top-down government is the best way to enable long term sustainable growth.
‘We have transport projects going forward in every region. Over half of the strategic road schemes approved as a result of the spending review settlement are in the north.’
