Now is the time for investment in rail

12 April 2012

The Government has good news and bad news for commuters. The good news from transport minister, Theresa Villiers, is that "we are on track" to deliver Crossrail, the east-west rail link. The project has been put on hold for decades; more delay would be intolerable.

Unfortunately, other decisions about transport spending seem to be directed by short-term contingencies, not long-term needs.

The bad news is that Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, has frozen an order for 1,300 commuter train carriages. Even more worryingly, Iain Coucher, chief executive of Network Rail, has said that if the Government were to cancel extra trains, it would make no sense to continue with planned improvements such as increasing platform lengths.

He also suggests that improvements to the Thameslink route are now in doubt.

This is disastrous short-termism. Of course, there has been a temporary dip in commuter numbers during the recession but fluctuations of this kind turn round very rapidly as the economy recovers.

Infrastructure spending, by contrast, takes years to plan, to commission and to execute but the effects last for decades and have a beneficial effect on the entire economy in the long term.

Most of the discussion about transport during the election focused on plans for high-speed rail links between cities. This paper supports these projects, even if their routes are a matter for debate.

But they pale in significance compared to the humdrum, unglamorous improvements in rolling stock and infrastructure which would deliver far greater results for commuter transport and at less environmental cost. More carriages on trains and longer platforms would greatly increase rail capacity - and overcrowding on commuter routes is severe.

This paper takes the problem of deficit reduction seriously. We have argued that there is a good case, for instance, to raise the retirement age sooner rather than later.

And some rail projects can certainly be modified in terms of routes or scale to provide substantial savings. But spending on rail stock and platforms delivers benefits for business in the long term. Cuts there are a false economy.

Our kind of glasnost

It seems somehow fitting that on the day that Mikhail Gorbachev arrives in Britain, the Government should be engaging in a new exercise in openness. It has published quantities of public spending data, the Coins database, concerning what departments have been authorised to spend, what they spent and what they are forecast to spend. This is real openness. Information about all future spending over £25,000 will be available from November.

Of course, ministers have exploited some of the information now available for party advantage by showing, for instance, how Labour ministers had authorised some projects before the election, presumably for political reasons.

But the truth is that most of the new data will be impenetrable, except to experts, and will require a considerable level of economic literacy to interpret. Nonetheless, this is a laudable exercise in transparency which will enable us to hold government to account in new ways. It's our online kind of glasnost.

Appliance of science

There is nothing like commercial imperatives to advance scientific discovery. Or so it seems, judging by easyJet's announcement that it has exploited a cheap way to enable planes to circumvent volcanic ash clouds. Given the amount airlines lost from the volcano, this is money well spent.

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