Co-opted Members to provide updates and feedback from their organisations.
Minutes:
Department for Transport
- Series of ministerial changes at the DfT. Guy Opperman MP, Anthony Browne MP and Lord Davies of Gower (all Parliamentary Under Secretary of States) have joined, whilst Richard Holden, Jesse Norman and Baroness Vere have departed. Local Transport (including CRSTS and LUF delivery), buses, active travel and highways maintenance now sit with Guy Opperman MP, with Huw Merriman leading on regions and devolution, as well as rail.
- Network North: £36bn from HS2 will be reinvested in the Midlands and the north, with savings from the Euston quarter redistributed nationally.
- Plan for drivers: department working with stakeholders and local authorities to ensure powers are used fairly and proportionately.
- MRN/LLM Programme – The Network north announcement included uplifts for schemes already in the programme, which has not yet reached final business case.
- New MRN2 programme announced with £1billion for the north, £650m for Midlands and £1bn for rest of country. Full details of the process and eligibility in spring 2024.
- Highways maintenance: £2.8bn roads national resurfacing fund for authorities outside of the midlands and southwest. £76m for Southwest Las for each of 23/24 and 24/25.
- 76 million pounds for southwest for each of two years, letters sent to local authority.
- The £2 bus fare cap to be extended until the end of December 24.
- Zebra 2 scheme – with 56 expressions of interest from local authority and £129m available, application deadline by the 15th December.
- Reimbursement guidance and calculator for the levels of concessionary fare payment have been circulated – this will return the system to be based on the actual passenger numbers. The net expected effect of the changes is likely to be a reduction in overall payments.
- Capital funding: allocation for local authority have been notified now, most local authorities will receive funding.
- City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements – additional £8.5bn funding via Network North. West of England CA to receive additional £100 million means the total indicative allocation for 2027/28 to 2031/32 is £752m.
National Highways
- Road investment strategy:
- Following the Government’s consultation on Road Investment Strategy 3 (RIS3) in Summer 2023, work continues to develop the draft RIS which DfT anticipates publishing in the next couple of months. This document will be high-level and set out Government’s high-level direction of travel towards the final RIS. It will also set out the overall budget for the RIS (statement of funds available). DfT anticipates publishing RIS3 late in 2024, followed by National Highways’ Strategic Business Plan and Delivery Plan setting out how we will deliver RIS3. The final reports of Connecting the Country and the Route Strategies will also be published with those documents. We are thankful to all the STBs for their continued engagement and support in a lot of this work and will continue to work with you over the next 9-12 months as we work towards the final Road Investment Strategy.
- Target of planting 3 million trees by 2030, looking for landowners to plant another 600,000 trees every year from next autumn as NH only have enough room for less than 10% of target.
- A30 Sparkford to Ilchester – 2 years in October since start of construction. Challenges to do with extreme weather means the open for traffic date will neo be Winter 2024/25 rather than the planned March 2024.
- Chiverton to Carland Cross – overnight closures of A30 in December for installation of new multi-use bridge at Chiverton. Flyover will be partially opened for traffic in early December.