Robertson says that transport in London benefits from the housing market dynamics but he has mixed feelings about Crossrail 2.
“It has a wonderful business case. That is not in dispute,” he says. “But when you look at the plan, it is not specific enough in terms of the wider economic and social benefits, including housing. It is not clear enough how they can be delivered in terms of GDP.”
Paul Harwood is now director of route sponsorship for Network Rail’s South East Route.
“The whole Thameslink Programme is inherently tied to the growth of housing on the key routes,” he says. “Although the core argument has always been about relieving congestion on the Underground.
“It was not motivated by the housing growth; that was more a consequence of what we were doing. The idea was developed in the 1990s. It was once called Thameslink 2000 as that was the original target date for completion. Since then the route has seen remorseless growth further and further out. Horsham, Crawley, and Three Bridges are still seeing new housing. It’s driven by London property prices.
“We are trying to work with Highways England to understand which areas are better served by road and which are better by rail. We have a habit, I think, of not coordinating. It comes back to rail’s USP: significant volumes over longer distances.
“Local authorities want more stations, but that has an impact on journey times, undermining the USP. Local authorities are used to dealing in roads; it is their option of choice. They don’t sort out the whole-system issues; they sort out the road problem associated with a housing development, and leave the resulting traffic to disappear into the system. It’s not their problem.”
Harwood says Network Rail’s devolved structure is promoting better links with local authorities. He suggests the recent Kent route strategy is the best Network Rail has produced. As well as taking national demand forecasting of housing and employment, it taps into local projections.
“On the railway, our constraint points are very often nowhere near where development is taking place. We have to get engagement across a wider area. Can we persuade a developer in Horsham or Lewes to help pay for a new junction near East Croydon, which his homebuyers will help to block up? It’s unlikely. The constraints we face are essentially not the concern of councils developing housing many miles away.”
Railways tend to have good links with councils but turning that into progress at the right time can be a challenge. The railway can take a long time to reach decisions. And it relies on people putting money in early.
“If you put in a station before the development is started, who is going to make the investment?” Harwood asks. “The local authorities are dependent on the developer, through what’s called a Section 106 agreement, or the community infrastructure levy. But there’s not a financial flow at that early stage to facilitate the work.”
Robertson believes it’s essential to ensure that in delivering infrastructure, new jobs are created, too. “Ultimately these are the people who will buy the new housing. If we don’t create jobs in the UK, we will deliver wage inflation because of a skills shortage.
“The Department for Transport doesn’t really understand this. It gets a budget and considers how to spend it on much narrower economics. It doesn’t for a minute think about the wider social impact in any profound way. DfT people would say it’s not their job to do so.
“But actually it is a vital part of what they do. We are helping them to buy into this. They can recruit people from Peterborough or Newcastle or other places outside of London to be the new maintenance staff. Train them up. Suddenly you start to make a case for wider economic potential. Justifying new infrastructure through creating jobs is low-hanging fruit.
“With Transport for the North breathing down its neck over Crossrail 2 investment, the Government really needs to show how this works for the country as a whole.”
That’s not easy. Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has led northern political leaders of all colours to demand London redresses “long-standing imbalances in transport funding.” George Osborne, the former Chancellor, had promised an electric high-speed line between Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield that would halve journey times. Chris Grayling backed the £30 billion Crossrail 2 but moved away from a commitment to electrify Liverpool to Newcastle.
The think tank IPPR North says journey speeds are half those in the south east, adding that the region would have received £59 billion more over the past decade if it had been funded at London levels.
“Before, DfT didn’t understand the job creation,” says Robertson. “It didn’t even ask the questions. These are transport geeks, not economists. Has central Government got better at this? Only slightly. The National Infrastructure Commission should be driving all this and it’s not.
“We’ve got quite bad wage inflation on the railway. That’s because we have skills shortages. It is starting to come together: look at the Secretary of State’s guidance to the ORR published in July. Paragraph 13: ‘Infrastructure must be procured in a way that gives the supply chain certainty so that they invest in skills.’ I’ve got the data to make that work. It’s part of the story now.”
Robertson believes Network Rail missed an opportunity during the rebuilding of Reading station. “It should have built shops above the platforms, but failed to leverage untapped commercial potential,” he says. “The local council, on the other hand, planned its entire town centre regeneration around the improved rail connection, and in particular the promise of future direct services into Heathrow airport.
“It’s not being done scientifically yet; it’s being done by enthusiastic amateurs. Maybe that is grossly unfair to some excellent examples of co-working, but it has been down to the common sense of a few wise people,” says Robertson. “It’s not like we have an established way to get more money into the railway from new developments.”
Why does this matter to the National Skills Academy for Rail, an organisation concerned primarily with training?
For the rail industry to really embrace its supply chain at a practical level, Robertson says it first needs to understand where it sits in the wider economic arguments, not just the technicalities of railway engineering.
“We are a membership organisation. Our members are selling the potential to drive economic growth, and housing is a key component of that. We can put a value on it. This is about making our case better, because better training leads to economic growth,” he says.
“Local authorities understand very well the social contribution developers can make for new schools, new roads, etc. But they haven’t extended that to railways just yet. Perhaps that’s because they’ve had to deal with Network Rail, which has behaved in a monolithic and difficult way, and been more focused on other things.
“The case is easy to make. It is so obvious that rail helps solve housing problems. Either by getting people to jobs that are further away, or by improving the value of houses.”
