Better Transport

The Ministers at the Department for Transport are the people who make all the key decisions. It is vital to understand how these decisions are made and to intervene at the right time to make your case. You have to know when the business case is going in and to fight for an opportunity to comment on it.

Don’t let the road get into the RFA

Many schemes are submitted for funding even before a business plan has been produced.

Since 2005 the Government has asked the eight English regions outside London to give advice on their transport priorities for the next 10 years. This advice helps the Department for Transport decide how to allocate funding between regions. After receiving its regional funding allocation (RFA) form the Government, each region goes back to its list of priorities and decides which schemes will actually get funded. It is a competition for funds between public transport schemes and road schemes.

New regional transport priority lists will be drawn up by regions in 2008-9. This time round the regional development agencies will be leading the process, instead of the regional assemblies. The list will include rail schemes as well as Highways Agency regional schemes and local authority ‘major schemes’ - public transport and road scheme over £5 million.

You should try hard to make sure your scheme never gets on your region’s list. How?

1. Find out the process and timings for your area. The Treasury has published guidance on the process for the next round of regional funding allocations. By early 2009 each region will submit its transport priority lists to the Department for Transport.
2. Find out how RFA spending priorities are decided in your region because each region does it differently. Who makes the decisions? Is there a regional transport board? Does it publish minutes? Can you attend meetings? You could either find out via your regional TAR (transport activist roundtable) or your regional assembly
3. Find out what schemes are under consideration. Are there any great public transport schemes that need more support? Would funding for these schemes be jeopardised if the funding went to road schemes instead?
4. Get busy. Contact local public transport groups and other groups who rely on public transport. Work together to lobby for RFA funding to go to public transport scheme, not roads. Circulate a briefing about your road scheme to key decision-makers. Organise publicity stunts at key meetings to get across the messages that transport funding should go towards improving public transport, not more road building.

Comment on the business case
There is no formal requirement for the Highways Agency or the DfT to consult people on the business case. But that is no reason for you not to jump in and review the business case.

The business case will be enormous and complex and many groups have fundraised to pay a transport or economics expert to examine the business case and report to the minister. Although hiring an expert can be expensive (minimum £2,000) it is well worth doing to ensure the arguments are as convincing as possible.

Inform the Department for Transport that you plan to review the business case and expect the minister to await your expert’s report before making a decision on the road. You will need to organise a realistic but tight time table to ensure that your expert’s report gets to the minister in time. We can help you with this stage and give you advice and contacts (simply contact us).

Review the appraisal summary table
If you don't have time to analyse the business case, consider asking the Highways Agency for the appraisal summary table for the scheme - comment on it and use it to gain media coverage. For example, the appraisal summary table for the project to widen junctions 16 to 223 or the M25 shows that the project will add 18,576 tonnes of carbon in the first year alone.

Check if the business case examined alternatives
At this early stage of considering the road, the Highways Agency needs to examine alternatives. Note the guidance in NATA:

"The New Approach To Appraisal is concerned with the way in which solutions are identified as well as the way in which they are appraised (TAG Unit 1.3, para 2.2.2)

"A key requirement of the New Approach To Appraisal is the need to consider a wide range of alternatives, aimed at solving the problem, rather than merely mitigating the symptoms of the problem." (TAG Unit 1.3, para 2.2.4)

But note that NATA says that the earlier development of transport options – perhaps in the regional transport strategy or through the multi-modal studies – will often have covered this option identification stage.

You may find that the Highways Agency and the DfT argue that an examination of alternatives was conducted and ruled out during the Multi-Modal Studies and in the RTS. Don’t accept that! Argue that the multi-modal studies were a very long time ago, and more is now known about climate change and the need for the road should be re-examined, and alternatives should be explored in this light.