Welcome to this morning’s evidence session. It is the fifth and penultimate oral evidence session of our inquiry into joined-up journeys. The session is going to focus on the Government’s recently published Better Connected strategy and whether it sets out a path towards integrated transport. Could I please ask our witnesses to introduce themselves, starting on my left?

I am the founder of Freewheeling. I was previously director of strategy and innovation at Transport for London. I now advise combined authorities and transport organisations on integrated transport decision making and change.

I am director of strategy, insight and external affairs at Transport Focus, the passenger watchdog.

I am chief executive of CoMoUK, the national charity for shared transport.

I am director of transport at the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. We have a very diverse portfolio of transport interests across rail, bus, active travel, ferries, and tunnels.

I am head of external affairs at Campaign for Better Transport.

Welcome. The first question is from me: does the Better Connected strategy articulate a coherent national vision for integrated transport across all modes and regions?

What I am about to say might sound slightly negative. First, I just want to say that it exists and no previous Government this century have even attempted to publish an integrated transport strategy, so huge credit for doing so. Secondly, it is full of good stuff. Almost everything in it is the right thing to do; a well-motivated Government doing the right things is to be applauded. However, it feels like there has been a semantic misinterpretation. It is literally an integrated transport strategy in that it takes all the transport strategies and integrates them into one document. What it is not is a strategy for integrated transport. That is great, because we will get things wrong the first time we try to do something ambitious, and this is the first time this century. It is brilliant but there is a lot of opportunity to improve version two, and I really hope version two is currently in the works. What this document does is list a load of activities, almost all of which are single mode, such as improving the regulation of tyre wear, noise standards for aviation and a bus survey. It is all great stuff. However, it does not include any of the key features necessary to create an integrated transport strategy. In some places, you have things such as the bus fare cap, which is a policy harmful to integrated transport. It is commended by this strategy as opposed to asking how we learn lessons from doing something that was determinedly single mode and made integrated transport harder. Fundamentally, an integrated transport strategy needs to define the targets we are trying to achieve, the obstacles and a pathway to get there. It does not quite manage that.

Our perspective is similar to Thomas’s. It flags some key challenges and we welcome the focus on highlighting multimodal journeys, timetable co-ordination, fare complexity and so on. We really welcome the shift from thinking about passenger journeys in silos to thinking about the whole experience. It has looked at things like personal security and accessibility, which is a particular interest of ours, as it is coming into the new watchdog. We have evidence that they are of increasing importance to passengers. Although we do not look at it in quite the same way as Thomas, we do want to see stage two. We want to see that being brought together, and we have ideas on some metrics we could use to do that. The identification of individual passenger experiences is strong and welcomed, but we need to think about how those are brought together. We are looking forward to stage two.

To answer your question briefly—it is a tough but fair question—no. To give a longer answer, perhaps I can start with a positive. In our world of shared transport, so car sharing, bike sharing, e-bike sharing, e-scooter sharing and lift sharing, and with a deep interest in mobility hubs that physically integrate with public transport and active travel—which is why we are so interested in integrated transport as a topic; it is something that millions of Britons are using all day long at the moment partly with shared, public and active, but it needs help—there are some really important things to recognise, which are firsts from UK Government. There is the commitment to scale up shared mobility. There are multiple references throughout the document to specific modes within shared mobility. There are some references to mobility hubs—nothing like as much as we would like, but these are all firsts. That is perhaps a rather scary observation. You could argue that an economy the size of ours should have got there long before, but it is a fact, and it is to be commended, that it is in there. What this is not is a strategy—I agree with Thomas’s point there. It is a vision. It calls itself both a strategy and a vision, and my conclusion is a bit confused as to what it is actually trying to be. It is more a vision than a strategy—hence I would join in about the thoughts and hopes for version two. It is a very welcome start but, as I am sure we will get on to later, there are lots of omissions and ironically failed connections within it. My last point is that it lacks ambition. There is an odd qualification in its very name—it is Better Connected, but better than what? What I want to be thinking about is an excellently collected strategy, which other countries are pushing forward with. There is a lot to commend here but there is also a lot to work on.

It is very positive. It is a further building block in what the Government are trying to achieve. The bus market is being reformed very positively. Legislation on rail reform is going through. We have legislation on English devolution that, in transport and other areas, tries to get decision making at the right level. We have longer-term healthy capital funding settlements from Government through the Transport for City Regions programme. This strategy builds on all those building blocks, and I find it very positive because it is very people-focused. It is very practical. It talks about the simplicity of things like ticketing, and covers key themes such as how modes join up with each other; how transport joins up with housing, development, and planning; and how we reform the way in which transport projects are appraised, which is a key issue for regions outside London and the south-east. The negative for me is that the strategy is almost silent on freight, and the Government’s key priority for economic growth makes me think that there needs to be something more compelling and coherent on freight. Within our region we have the Port of Liverpool, which handles almost half of the UK’s transatlantic trade. Between 90% and 95% of trade comes via maritime corridors, and there is nothing in the 41 commitments at the end of the strategy that is bespoke or specific to freight. It is a very big silence that needs to be tackled. It is not bold enough on accessibility; there is far more that could be done. There is not enough on affordability of travel, which is one of the big issues of our times. Hopefully, we can explore that more with the Committee.

In our submission to the call for ideas, we recommended six priorities. They were: integration across transport modes; empowering local authorities; balancing capital and revenue funding; harnessing data and technology; integration across wider policy areas and Departments; and growth and planning alignment. The eight priorities that we see in the strategy map directly relate to at least three of those: empowering local leaders; data and technology; and transport and development. The partnership principle maps across to our priority of integration across wider policy areas. From our point of view, four out of six is not bad, but there is less on capital and revenue funding. As we have already mentioned, there is a noticeable absence of practical detail on integration between modes. We would like to think of integrated transport as a hierarchy of three things: first, everything that pertains to spatial development; secondly, integrating that infrastructure in your spatial development strategies; and thirdly, things like operations, ticketing, information and so on. At the top of this, we have PI, the payments and information set of priorities, which includes multimodal contact lists, Project Coral, Mini Switzerland and things like that. They are absolutely fantastic, but we would put everything that pertains to payment information as the third priority. The top priority really needs to be spatial development, where you put your infrastructure, and then you have the people-focused approach. However, we think that, overall, the fact that we have a strategy for the first time in 25 years is extremely welcome. The framing is very strong. It is great to have something that really supports our sector. There is a lot in it that recognises that two out of five of the poorest demographics do not have access to a car, for example, and there is a lot on accessibility, which is very good. If it were to be better, perhaps we should look at people, places and partnerships. We could think about planning, positioning, and payments or a new hierarchy. The key thing that could be added is a modal hierarchy. In the sector, we are all familiar with the sustainable transport hierarchy: walking, wheeling and cycling at the top, and private cars at the bottom. There is no recognition of that sense of priorities. There is a distinct lack of a mode shift target, which was promised in the Getting Britain Moving document in advance of this Government. There is not much mention of Wales and Scotland. They have strategies, so how does this fit with those? As Jamie mentioned, there is nothing on freight and logistics, which is important. There is a data and technology section, but it is curious that perhaps the biggest revolution to mobility in data and technology is autonomous vehicles, driverless cars. I do not think there is a single mention of those, so it would be good to see some recognition of what is coming down the track.

You have all touched on things that we will pick up in more detail. This is a yes or no question, and I suspect I know the answer, but I will ask it anyway. Do you think the strategy would benefit from an action plan or timelines? Would you like to see more detail of what could be done, how and by when?

An action plan is helpful, but the targets need to be in place first, and then clarity is needed on the actual problems that it is trying to solve. A lot of the problems that prevent integrated transport are around governance and incentive structures. The Competition Act 1998 also makes it really hard. These are problems for central Government to address, and it is very initiative-focused. The danger of just focusing on an action plan is that it encourages putting times to a list of initiatives as opposed to the actual enablers, which is where central Government should be playing.

My answer is yes. I certainly recognise what Thomas said, and to touch on what Michael said, it is striking how little net zero, climate action and climate change is referenced, which is a concern. It points to a lack of the wider, big-picture legislative target context that Thomas referred to. This is not tied into the stuff that is above it, controlled by other Departments in part. Transport and taxation are another obvious example. To be fair, it does have a crack at that on spatial developments, which is welcome, but you do not come away with a sense that MHCLG and DFT are going to work together on this. I scored it by when, why, what, who and so on. The when is pretty much absent. The why is also pretty much absent. The what has quite a lot of content. The how is weak—that goes to your action plan question. The who is very weak. To give a specific from our world, it is very difficult to get shared mobility and rail to co-locate, work together and so on. That is an obvious starting point—not least because the rail sector is being nationalised, of course, so surely that is a huge opportunity. But there is very little on the point about join-up. The document does go to the where a little with the urban-suburban rural split, but not enormously. If you contrast it with, for example, what Ireland has and is trying to do, it has a national overarching plan with sub-plans per segment of transport. I like the fact that you can look at the commitments list there, and it has timings and people against it. They then publish an annual progress report so you can see how it is going, but we do not have that here.

Perhaps I can give one example where it does actually go into a target, but not really with the actions, and it is quite tentative—rail station accessibility. It talks about 66% of journeys using stations that are accessible and says that we will try to get that to 71% by 2029. We have to ask ourselves whether it is acceptable to go into the fourth decade of this century with three out of every 10 journeys still struggling with inaccessible stations. Our Mayor has set the target locally. We are progressing quite well, but his target is total accessibility of all stations across the Liverpool city region by 2030. Hand in hand with that, we introduced a new fleet on the Merseyrail network that we control. We made platform adaptations as well as bringing in new trains, so that people can do what is called level boarding, which is particularly helpful for those with buggies or wheelchairs. It is one of the best but quietest transport revolutions there has been, because people used to have to pre-book assistance at stations if they needed to get down to the platform via a ramp and on to the train. It has reduced pre-booked assistance bookings by between 80% and 90% since it was introduced, and it has been a huge boost for people travelling independently. The report talks about working with the industry on whether new fleets and level boarding can be brought in. On something like accessibility, it has to be bold and a call to arms for a new organisation such as Great British Railways, because there is a national accessibility scheme called Access for All, but it is done in a very protracted and very slow way. The rail industry needs an instruction from something like this to move at a much quicker pace.

Some of you have mentioned the gaps and omissions specifically on freight, and weakness on affordability and accessibility. Are there any other glaring gaps or omissions that you want to pick up?

One we need still to wrestle with is that, when you look at public transport statistics, somewhere between three quarters and four fifths of public transport trips are taken on bus. In the past few decades, despite having 70% to 80% of public transport trips, bus travel has had an inversely proportional amount of spending, attention and focus given to it. It is the predominant mode in every city region and we are trying to reform it, but the strategy is silent on how you get that rebalancing. We are in a strange position where, although we have very healthy capital funding settlements from Government, there is little assistance to authorities that want the running costs of trying to manage a transition to a franchise bus network. There is a strange comparison because the bus network was deregulated in the 1980s. That is being unpicked, but at a local level with quite tight funding constraints. The rail system is being unpicked from 1990s legislation, but it is being done at national level with somewhere between £200 and £400 million of transition costs. If we are taking the bus sector seriously as the main form of public transport, should Government not give more financial support to not just the big combined authorities, but smaller regional authorities and rural authorities where buses are a lifeline, in order to reform the bus industry in the way they are doing nationally for rail?

I am not sure if it is fair to call this an omission, but there is a lot of emphasis on technology, integrated ticketing and being cashless. There are many consumers who are still not using digital payment methods and do not have access to technology, so we need to make sure that we bring those with us as we integrate transport better. I would like to see the next steps on that.

The biggest gap is largely around integrated transport—bizarrely, for an integrated transport strategy. There are eight stated priorities; none of them refers to integrating timetables anywhere in the document other than a brief reference under Mini Switzerland, but it is not a priority. I would really emphasise the point about autonomous vehicles. The Government seem to have become very myopic on autonomous vehicles. The Robotaxi proposition has been brought by Silicon Valley. There was a press release recently that quantified the benefits of autonomous vehicles to the UK economy at £42 billion, which seems an absolutely insane number. This number was picked up by the BBC and widely used. I asked Tym Syrytczyk, the AV expert, to dig into where that number came from. It is a pre-covid estimate for the value of a UK AV manufacturing sector. To use it in the context of a partnership with a Robotaxi company is total nonsense—it is a nonsense number. We are being pulled in the direction of saying that Robotaxis equal AV. If you look at the potential for AV as part of an integrated transport network, Oslo has the largest pilot of AVs as part of the integrated transport network in Europe. The local transport authority, Ruter, has a fleet of autonomous vehicles that they are testing as shuttles to local rail hubs to enable first and last-mile connections. There are a lot of challenges in that. The cost needs to fall dramatically for that to become viable at scale, but if you are starting an integrated transport strategy, then not looking at the opportunities of autonomous vehicles as, potentially, a transformative, integrated part of a public transport network means you are potentially missing a huge opportunity. This sense that we have to do what Waymo is asking us to do feels dangerous. We have done this before, and we are now having a debate about social media and AI. We need to decide what we want from autonomous vehicles. If there is one place that it should be front and centre, it is an integrated transport strategy.

On omissions, I agree that AV howls off the page by its absence. We are shortly to publish our first work on this and the lack of policy in that space is striking. There is even a lack of debate around what the policy might become in that space. This is already an enormous missed opportunity, but it will only get worse if it does not get attention from documents such as this and what the Government then follows on to do. In our world of shared mobility, the AV point counts, because there are some potentially very profound ramifications, opportunities, threats and interactions between AV and shared mobility, all of which the document is totally silent on. This goes straight into integrated transport in a bigger-picture sense as well, as Thomas touched on. You can easily look at AV and ask what it means for rail and bus revenues. It is not necessarily good news. All of that needs to be engaged with and shaped. In our world of shared mobility, I would highlight mobility hubs, which I have touched on. It is extraordinary to me that there is so little on that. The last point is lift-sharing or carpooling, which is just not there.

I do not want to spend too much time talking about modal integration, because we have discussed it, but it is important. There is a case for it to be one of the sets of principles, which is about modal integration. The case studies are interesting but very varied. It almost tries to do everything and, in so doing, misses out opportunities for case studies of what successful integrated modes look like. Liverpool city region is a fantastic one and Nottingham is very interesting, as it is the only clear example of a region with successful integrated modes. However, that case study is there because of the workplace parking levy. For example, might there be a case study of Hull Paragon interchange? This is where rail and bus actually work together and show that this is the way to do things, rather than Bristol Temple Meads at present, for example. How do we achieve modal integration? That would be good. The other important thing to mention is that if we think about GBR becoming the second largest employer after the NHS, we requested that non-emergency patient transport and health service are integrated. It is good that the strategy mentions that 66% of people over 65 cannot reach a hospital within half an hour. That is really important. We can look at other trip generators as well—schools, centres of education and people who do not have the ability to drive—and think about how those major trip generators are really integrated with the transport network.

Thomas, you have painted a rather dark picture of Robotaxis. It is not just Silicon Valley, is it? It is also Thames Valley because we have Wayve here in London, which is doing fantastic work. There is a transition. For Wayve, it is not about going straight to Robotaxis. It is about equipping vehicles that we are going to buy today, next year or in 10 years’ time to have more and more autonomous features. I spoke to Asda last week and they are working with Wayve to think about how they could deliver groceries to people, so this is much broader than Waymo. I know they are very visible in London but it is much broader, isn’t it? Perhaps we should be less cynical in terms of integrated transport.

You are absolutely right. That is exactly the correct way of looking at it. It is a broad enabling technology, but if you look at the materials coming out of DFT, they are very focused on Robotaxi and partnerships with Robotaxi companies. What is the purpose of an integrated transport strategy? It is largely to achieve access to opportunity for people. How do AVs form part of that? It is an enabling technology that can be used and deployed in multiple different ways. The document is silent on that. Is it part of the service provided by the public sector? We do not know. Is it something that is used for the entire journey, which is what the Robotaxi model is? That is probably not the most efficient way of using the technology but the document is silent on that. I completely agree with your approach of saying, “This is an enabling technology. Now let us work out how it can be used.” Asda can do a commercial deal with Wayve. Fantastic—crack on with it. But integrated transport is something where the state has for decades said, “We are going to lead,” so it therefore needs to lead and define what it wants.

Does the strategy, in the case studies that it sets out and includes, reflect best practice on multimodal integration?

No. The case studies, as has been said, are a long list of outstanding achievements in all kinds of highly disparate areas. They are fantastic and I enjoyed reading them. They gave me a great, warm feeling. Fundamentally, there are not that many great case studies of multimodal integration outlined in the document. I actually ran the document through a large language model and asked it to assess and categorise each section of the document. By its estimate, which seems reasonable, having looked at it myself, about 8% of the document is around new activities to promote multimodal integration and 92% of the document is not. There are really good case studies; a lot of them are in Europe. We could learn a lot from places that have been doing this very successfully for many years. There were no examples of where we can learn lessons at all. The fundamental point around multimodal integration is that we need to be clear what the targets are and what we are trying to achieve through this. A figure quoted in the document is that only 14% of journeys use more than one transport mode. We all know the number of people who pile out of the train at Waterloo on to the underground, so the vast majority of those will be happening in London and the south-east, which means that multimodal integration barely exists outside London and a handful of other cities. As a start, we need a target for improving access to opportunity. It references the DFT’s connectivity tool but stops. That can form an access target where we can measure every UK citizen’s access to employment, health and education as a single metric and target improving that. That is the purpose of transport. Then, as an integrated transport strategy, we can increase the number of journeys that are made multimodally and, as Michael says, have a mode share target, because that has always been an explicit part of the purpose of an integrated transport strategy—to make it easier for people to be able to use modes that are not car. None of those targets are there. As you rightly say, you then need the enablers to make that happen and case studies where that has been done.

I will build on one of the points that Thomas made about international comparisons. That is quite stark. I have come from an international energy background—I was previously in telecoms. In those sectors, it is very common and normal to look to international reference points. It does seem slightly peculiar to the transport sector in the UK, or GB, that we do not do that. We should look at great examples from abroad.

It is not only that but, as Thomas said, the best of this stuff is not here anyway. It comes down to what we are aiming for, and we all probably agree that there is a bit of a blank, which is problematic. Assuming we get a better definition of that, unquestionably, in our experience, no nation state has it perfect but most other European nation states are significantly ahead. If we are going to have case studies in the document, I would much rather see those as something to aim for, with some knitting together between the case studies and the text, which Better Connected does not do very well at all. The case studies are left trying to do a lot of heavy lifting in a curiously isolated way, and they are mostly from the wrong places. Every two or three weeks, I get asked where in the UK we are really good on this stuff. I am sad to say that my standard response is that I do not have a quick and easy answer. What I can do is assemble a pudding of different bits of places with different aspects and then create somewhere that does not actually exist but I wish did. If you want to go and see something that is much closer to that, you should go to this list of countries.

I would agree with what my colleagues have said, particularly Thomas. I do not think there are huge examples or exemplars outside London and the south-east. How much of the strategy can become an instruction to future authorities when they invest? The focus must be on how you spend money in the future and how you get it right. We have a scheme in Liverpool to try to modernise Liverpool Central station, which is one of the busiest stations in the UK. It is very close to Lime Street, which is another major rail station. It is very close to Queen Square, which is the region’s major bus station. The three do not interact at the moment. If we are going to modernise Central, it is not a rail scheme. How does it integrate with all the other transport modes, and then how does it integrate with all the housing and regeneration around it? I will make one other point. I do not think we should define integrated transport just as interchanging easily between modes. It is about integrated or common standards. I do not think it is good enough to use the rail network where you have real-time information and then you stand at a run-down bus stop with no real-time information, or you are on the local bus that runs to time and then you get on a national train and it does not run to time. It is about having common standards with all operators, whether they are publicly or privately controlled, working to a very reliable timetable. Quite a lot of transport-focused research does not show integrated transport as the top need for customers. It shows reliability and the affordability of services as the two critical needs.

I would echo what Jamie said about standards; there is something interesting here. On RTI—real-time information—and SD2, which are safe and dependable journeys, there is an emphasis on improving the quality of real-time information. That is really important but at which modal interchange? Is it at bus stops? Is it at railway stations? We are making the case with industry colleagues for a standard at bus stops, because there has not been one and there has been for railway stations. That is the sort of thing that puts people off using the bus. Potentially the first interaction with the public transport network for many people is the bus stop, so that is really important. Standards are very important in alignment, and enabling local authorities to work with central Government on those standards. Going back to the question of whether there are enough case studies or examples of successful intermodal integration, there is cycle-rail integration. We do not have a modal integration priority. We have healthy communities in which cycle-rail is mentioned. That is about it. Mini Switzerland is very welcome. The funding for Mini Switzerland, which Thomas has pioneered, is superb but is in a category of payments information. It is not really about lining up your modes or your infrastructure. I mentioned Nottingham—if you have not been to Nottingham, get there as soon as you can. It is a phenomenal example of European-style integrated transport. It is astonishing. Curiously what we find in this country is often intermodal debate, even within the transport sector. Is a tram better or worse than a bus, a train, a bike or a bus? All this is quite unfortunate because when you go to Nottingham, you see that there are more bus stops than you have ever seen in your life around a tram network in the middle. It integrates almost by default because you have all the modes there. That all stems from 25 years ago, which is the last time we had a strategy. Nottingham had strong political leadership and a very willing and supportive Minister. They went ahead and used the powers they had to set up the workplace parking levy. It is an outstanding example. Otherwise, there are no case studies in the strategy and there needs to be. Going back to my earlier point, we need to have a case study of how you actually get those modes integrated. That starts, again, with spatial development strategy. I should say Liverpool city region, for example, has an extremely strong spatial development strategy, with transport at its heart. Those are the approaches we really need to see more of in this strategy. Spatial development sits first. How you actually connect those modes sits after that, and then operations, ticketing, information and so on. Frankly, if you get a train to somewhere and there is no bus stop connected to it, you cannot have an integrated journey. There is no point in having multimodal ticketing if you have not actually aligned those modes. It is about spatial development, integrating interchanges and then operations.

If I remember, back in the day, the changes in Nottingham, how they were paid for and what it was going to deliver were hugely controversial within Nottingham, and between Nottingham and Government. You would not go backwards from there now.

You mentioned Mini Switzerland, and Mr Ableman, I know this is something about which you have a great passion on a number of platforms. I want to ask about the funding that Government are providing for the Mini Switzerland demonstrator in the Hope Valley, which for those who do not know, is the only direct railway between Manchester and Sheffield—well, the only direct railway these days but we will not get into the Woodhead route at this particular juncture. What do you think will be learned from that Mini Switzerland demonstrator project? How applicable to a wider area do you think those lessons are likely to be?

It is a great question. It is one of the very few examples of things that I have done that are directly inspired by Boris Johnson, who is not normally my role model. This comes out of where I live in Walthamstow, in east London, and that was Mini Holland, which Boris funded back in 2014 as a demonstrator of what can be achieved on active travel. To an extent, the benefit of Mini Holland was just that someone had tried to do it. Lots of local authorities, leaders and officers would come to visit and walk around Walthamstow and say, “How did you do that? What was difficult? What was easy?” They would learn whatever lessons they wanted to learn for their patch. For clarity, Mini Switzerland is a demonstrator project in the east midlands to integrate timetables, ticketing, fares, information and physical integration. It is about doing what they do in Switzerland as a matter of absolute course and routine in one place. What I would like that to be is, partly, “How did you do it?” The East Midlands Combined County Authority and Mayor Claire Ward really stepped up and engaged with it. DFT reacted really well to it, and I give a huge commendation to them both. We published a report recommending Mini Switzerland in February and it was funded in this document, which is really a great pace of activity across those two institutions. What it needs to be is simply: how did East Midlands Combined County Authority do it? What were the challenges? How were they overcome? It can be a learning opportunity for other places. The metric in my mind is that I would like to see the cost of subsidy per bus passenger fall. I do not envisage that the cost of providing bus services in the Hope Valley will fall because there will be more and better buses. At the moment, we are providing expensive and underused buses as a social safety net, and I would like to see if we can provide buses that are well used at a lower cost per passenger, providing far more access to opportunity for people in the Hope Valley and for visitors to the Hope Valley. One in three people in Manchester and Sheffield have no access to a car and are de facto locked out of the national park on their doorstep. This is the kind of thing that can fix that. Transport Focus has offered to do a lot of research for the Mini Switzerland project and, to an extent, the key thing is just to learn stuff, publish it and allow lessons to be learned by different places for whatever is applicable to them. I would also like to see other places—obviously, DFT has funded Hope Valley, but I would like to see other Mini Switzerlands, because Hope Valley is only one place. Various other places I have been speaking to over the course of the last few months are interested in doing their own Mini Switzerland, which would be fantastic, because then different lessons can be learned about its applicability in different geographies.

It will be very interesting. You have all made points that have wider applicability. It seems to me that we have a bizarre aversion in this country, particularly in relation to transport, to looking at and learning from beyond our shores. I do not really understand why but that is definitely beyond the scope of this. It would be good to hear more in your subsequent answers about what some of those international examples of good practice examples are.

Good idea. We are now going to move on to roads, rail, bus and active travel integration.

The strategy sets out a good aim of ensuring seamless connections between trains and buses, but does it provide enough practical detail? Does it go into any of the incentives that might be needed to make that happen?

Do not feel you all have to answer every question if you feel it has been answered.

We have talked about this to an extent, so I do not want to go over old ground. What is interesting, in my experience, is that there are teams within train operating companies, which in due course will be GBR, that have integrated transport leads. They are thinking about it, but the strategy does not appear to. We go back to the point about measurability. The metrics are quite helpful but there is not really anywhere where it says that these metrics will be quantifiable. In 2026, for example, the railway stations and bus stops in Liverpool city region are—that is a bad example, because they are great—scored as three out of five. In 2036, they will be four out of five or five out of five. We do not have really quantifiable metrics. In terms of practical recommendations, they are notable by their absence. I mentioned earlier that it would be useful to have a case study of successful integration between rail and bus. A good one that I mentioned is the Hull Paragon interchange. The clue is in the name. There are no case studies and no practical guidelines for that particular aspect, which is something that could be addressed in due course because the industry is doing it already.

There is a key point to make: the potential for greater integration is very much strengthened by devolution. I do not think it is fair to expect central Government to sort integration across all parts of England or the UK. The power in the devolution settlement is for regional Mayors to try to take more public control of the network, because the two things that will ultimately create the environment for integration are timetables that work and connect. If the rail and bus network are both specified publicly, that is more likely. If common ticketing can apply across different modes, which again requires public intervention, the power is at local level for Mayors and regional authorities to try to push this whole theme and do it more effectively than has ever been the case.

What are the incentives and disincentives that you find for doing that?

The disincentive at the moment is that the transport industry—this is not allocating blame to anyone—has been very fragmented. The rail industry does not think as one. The bus industry does not think as one because there are multiple operators that have danced largely to their own tune. The culture previously was for each operator to worry about their operation and not to worry about how it connects to other operations so that transport can work as one. The great incentive in bus franchising reform and rail reform is for public authorities to grasp this whole challenge and come up with timetables, operating incentives and performance frameworks for private operators who will still operate the bus franchises, and work in partnership with Great British Railways to have strong partnerships locally. The incentive and opportunity is there for this to be done far better than it has been done in the last 40 years.

Can I come back briefly in support of that point? What is interesting about this strategy is whether it needs to be an action plan. Can it be a strategy to which local authorities refer? One of the strongest points or priorities in there is empowering local leaders. Ultimately, devolution is perhaps the biggest game in town. We are working towards full devolution. If we get to a situation where all the local leaders feel they have sufficient support, guidance, and vision from the strategy, they are really going to do the important work in terms of integration.

We have questions coming up on devolution.

Does anyone else want to answer that?

I will offer just a brief thought because the section is tragically not headed bus, rail, active travel and shared mobility integration, so I have less to say—but that is my point. It is really very 1990s to be talking about bus and rail integration, but here we are. It is still a massive missed trick, and this is not just about physical co-location. It is about all the other points that have been covered relating to quality standards, ticketing, information and so on. Through the 1990s, we were on a rambling and far too slow a journey. In the 2010s, active travel started to be taken seriously. We then moved forward and had some funding programmes. Active Travel England was created. You can see this reflected in Government documents. It is a good litmus test. What is the stock phrase used to describe sustainable transport? It has widened out to include active travel, which is an extremely important thing. What it has not done is widen it out to include shared mobility, yet you can see that in Better Connected very easily. It is scattered about all over the show and is not there in lots of places. I would also make the point that community transport—not directly our world but adjacent to it—is also missing in action in Better Connected and in that narrative.

At the moment, we do a huge amount of user research with bus passengers, rail passengers and users of the strategic road network. We do not do integrated research. We do not measure how people feel on an integrated transport journey. Those rail and bus comparisons are important for different local authorities. They can see and compare how buses are doing against others. The different rail operating companies can see how they compare with others, but if we can get some research and metrics that actually measure consistently across different authorities, the integrated transport experience—

What stops you from doing that?

It is partly funding. We do our rail stuff with the rail industry. The rail customer experience survey is funded by the Department and the rail operating companies. Your Bus Journey is funded by local authorities and the DFT. These are huge things, £100,000—

It is fundamentally all public money.

Absolutely. It is definitely something we want to look to in the future.

You have just had a case study of exactly that—we can leave now, because that is it, isn’t it? The question you just asked is the most important question of the whole thing, as far as I am concerned. Why does this not happen? What does integrated transport mean? It means integrated in place, price, times and in terms of the customer experience. This does not happen not because transport managers are stupid and have never thought of it. It does not happen because none of the incentives are designed to make it happen. If you are going to integrate in place, a bus needs to divert via the railway station, which makes it take longer. If you are going to meet the train, the timetable needs to be designed to meet the train and it will typically have to lay over longer at the ends of the route, which means you will need an extra bus in the cycle, which costs you both capital and operational investment. If you are going to integrate fares, the allocation mechanism will distribute that fare among two operators, not one, which will mean that the revenue per journey will be lower. So if you are managing a single-mode P&L, whether in the public or private sector, you are disincentivised to do so. If you do not fix those incentives, then it will not happen. We have single-mode management of transport in the UK right up to director-general level of the Department for Transport, hence Alex’s funding settlement for surveys. We must fix those incentives. In Switzerland, there are 250 transport operators, all of which have a legal duty to collaborate. In the United Kingdom, we have the Competition Act, which makes bus and rail operators very nervous about talking to each other on precisely the questions we are asking them to collaborate on. That is why I am hoping that version two of the strategy addresses precisely these questions. To come back to the earlier point that integrated transport is not one of the top priorities for passengers, that is absolutely right. The challenge here is a bit like the old transport planning joke—no one crosses the river so there is no demand for a bridge. At the moment, people cannot make integrated journeys, so they do not. Therefore, they do not live their lives around the opportunities that integrated journeys would fulfil. If you look at the Centre for Cities research, the only place in the United Kingdom that achieves European benchmark productivity levels is London, which is the only place with a meaningful integrated transport network. Every other city and region of the UK drastically underperforms on productivity, and therefore GDP per passenger, because people have to leave where they live for opportunity because they cannot get to places. That is what they do, and it happens across the UK, which is why enabling proper connectivity would increase GDP in the UK over the long run by estimates of between £70 billion and £200 billion. The scale of the opportunity from doing this is enormous, but existing passengers will not tell you they want it because they have moved to an overheated London, away from the places they live because this does not exist.

Thinking about the rest of the country, do you think the strategy is overly focused on city regions? Is there enough in there about how to achieve integration in more rural areas or market towns?

I don’t think there is enough around that. I am very conscious that a lot of the major combined authorities have a history of being where the passenger transport executives—the urban transport authorities of their day—were based. There is a huge challenge in terms of rural transport connectivity. If you look at the statistics on transport-related social exclusion in England, 11 million people suffer from some degree of transport-related social exclusion, where they do not have services to catch, they cannot afford services or there are accessibility barriers. I do not see any concerted, bespoke effort to try to join this up, particularly in a national funding sense, across the country. Looking at the Irish example, Transport for Ireland has a very bespoke operation called TFI Local Link, which is all about accepting that rural bus services may not be as commercially viable as they are in urban areas, and there is a strong push to try to sustain a level of service for rural areas, including some degree of bookable demand-responsive transport. There is no equivalent across England. I am very conscious at times that, when we are debating transport issues as combined authorities, the voices of those who have rural transport disconnectivity are not heard as well as they should be.

I absolutely agree with Jamie. There does need to be more on rural. What we need for rural is for people who live in rural areas to have effectively the same menu of options as people who live in urban areas. There is good recognition in the strategy that 80% of people live in urban areas, but 20% is a significant proportion. They need to be able to decide: do I take the bus, train, tram, private car, taxi or cycle? They need to have the same range of options, and if a car is the best option, great, but it needs not to be the only option. That is very important but does not really come out in the strategy. However, it is very positive. We have talked about Mini Switzerland. That is a rural demonstrator and it is a good thing, but what we should be cognisant of is that it might be too simplistic to distinguish between urban and rural. What about coastal? Is Blackpool rural? Is Northumberland rural? Are the Cotswolds rural? In terms of where wealth sits, it is not always straightforward. One of the most powerful things we have heard is Thomas’s transport planning joke. There is also the powerful parable that I have increasingly started to tell people, and I am surprised how many do not know this fact. Blackpool used to have the busiest railway station in the world and it is now a multi-storey car park.

I wanted to briefly talk about rural.

Let us cover rural now. We have questions later but we may cover it now, so go on.

The quick answer is no, it does not have enough in there. It is only fair to recognise that rural is really hard on an integrated transport front. It is coming from further back due to a range of factors—particularly relevant are central Government strategies or the lack of central Government strategies, when it comes to rural transport, over many decades. The PTE legacy point that Jamie touched on is very powerful. Surely the trick is to build on it and not denigrate it at all. Four combined authorities, increasingly with devolution, will have patches that cover both sides of this. If I am sitting in one of those, or one of those is going to be created in the next couple of years, I will turn to Better Connected for some help as to how I go about it, but it is very thin. To give it some credit, it does have a split on urban, suburban and rural, which is simplistic, but at least it has gone some way toward getting a bit of detail in there that recognises variety. But it is nothing like enough. There are no targets, no funding and no sense of a meaningful shift behind it.

The poorest canton of Switzerland, Uri, deep in the Alps—they are not Zurich bankers—has a higher GDP per person than any region of the United Kingdom other than London. When I spoke to Helmut Eichhorn, who runs Alliance SwissPass, which is the organisation that brought together all 250 transport operators in Switzerland to develop integrated transport, I asked him what was the No. 1 thing we should do to enable an integrated transport solution like his. He said, “The first thing you should do is make sure that your politicians and people understand that this is the way to become a wealthy country.” The point is that they do not think they are rich so they can afford integrated transport; they think they are rich because they have integrated transport. The east midlands and Switzerland are similar, with lots of hills and a number of medium-sized cities. In the east midlands, 6% of journeys are made by public transport. In Switzerland, a quarter of journeys are made by public transport, which means that people have access to opportunity. Every village in Switzerland with 300 people or more has a direct bus to the station every single hour. People are connected to employment, education, opportunity and health. We are nowhere near Switzerland. It will take us a long time to get to that level but the starting position, as Helmut Eichhorn said, is that we have to convince ourselves of the truth that this is the way to become not just a wealthy city with a country attached, but a wealthy country.

I welcome those comments, particularly on the challenge around coastal communities, which is not faced in Switzerland, where there are always 50% fewer places to connect to by definition. That is very interesting, and I want to go back to something that Thomas said. He landed it all the way up to the top of the silos that exist separately, which I certainly agree with. It is part of the motivation to carry out this inquiry. Does this not require us also to change how we think, do, speak about, and particularly cost and measure transport to de-silo the language? The job is not to run the railways or the buses; it is to provide joined-up journeys and integrated transport, albeit necessarily operationally through those channels. Do we have to change the language we use so that it actually talks about joined-up journeys as the main objective of all and any transport mode?

That is why the targets are so crucial and why it is such a crucial gap in this strategy. That is also why I would recommend an access target as the No. 1 metric, simply defining each individual citizen of the UK’s access to economic, health and educational opportunities. The connectivity tool is a great start. We have the technology to measure that now. One aggregated measure for the whole nation’s access to opportunity is the purpose of this and we can build from there.

Could I come in on that point? There is a huge cultural challenge, particularly for central Government. In regional combined authorities, transport is seen as the jewel in the crown of the mayoral portfolio. It is the way in which you can seriously impact, as Thomas said, the productivity, working lives and economies of local areas. Transport is not seen in that pecking order at Westminster, which is a cultural challenge. The second thing about how central Government and even DFT organise themselves is that they are hugely siloed. Let me take, for example, freight for the Port of Liverpool. National Highways initially allocated £250 million for an access road improvement to the Port of Liverpool. It was quite controversial for local residents and communities, and it was quite a sensitive issue. The £250 million eventually dropped out of National Highways’ budget. Nothing is happening. What should have happened is that the Government said, “Port of Liverpool access is nationally important. We are allocating £250 million and there should be a local debate around whether it is for road improvements, active travel and public realm improvements locally to balance that, or rail freight improvements.” DFT said, “We cannot transfer money that was in the roads budget to rail or move it somewhere else. Yes, Port of Liverpool access is important but the money has gone.” We cannot go on operating like that because it is so siloed.

Richard, you talked about mobility hubs. The concept is great, but the term is terrible. Do you have any more detail on how you think this approach could improve integration?

For clarity, the name is accepted within the industries involved, but the moment you talk to normal people it can go a bit awry, because people do not necessarily know what the phrase means. I agree there is a problem around the name. Government could help with that, of course, by pushing this name and defining it or coming up with another and better name. I am less bothered about the name than what these things do. These are multimodal hubs, where you are talking about physical integration. Ideally, you are talking about digital integration as well, but in our definition, it is about bringing together at least one mode of public transport, one mode of shared, and one mode of active in a way that improves the public realm and does not foster further use of private car. That last point you can push harder on depending on where you put the balance in these definitions. It is something that continental Europe has embraced at scale and something that UK Governments have no definition of. This document does not bring it forward and there has never been a policy around it. They have never done anything about integrating into other areas such as rail, education or the NHS—all obvious join-up points. Through a slightly dizzying array of different funding pots, some work has been funded here. We conservatively estimate that there will be about 220 publicly funded mobility hubs existing by the end of 2027. That is nothing like the scale you would get in Germany, France, Austria and so on, but it is of significance now. It is not just nothing. It is not just one small pilot. So I think there is an enormous missed opportunity not to put that front and centre as an example of how you go about physical integration and then bridge into the digital integration on the back of it, because they are natural places for that. This also goes to a wider agenda that is largely absent around social value and community integration, which in part goes to the points about overall access to opportunity and the size of the economy that Thomas has rightly been making. In our experience, this is something that mobility hubs are extremely good at delivering. In other words, they are not just transport interventions; they are very much health and community interventions. They have a profound list of direct and indirect benefits. So there is a major missed trick. The big picture is that, from a UK Government perspective, at the moment there is absolutely nothing. There is no further funding. There remains no policy and no plan around mobility hubs, which is obviously very hard cheese if you are one of those areas hoping to get one but which did not win that particular competitive funding pot game. There are also profound implications on the private sector side, where despite—rather than because of, sadly—spatial planning policies, there are none the less quite a significant number of housing developers that will now put mobility hubs in developments as a default. Logically, you would be integrating all these approaches across the private and public sector. You would be looking at what the UK’s totality of mobility hubs is. Who has delivered and funded what is a second order question, but we have nothing on that at all. We fear that not only are we not getting public sector ones in the future but it will probably have a chilling effect on the private sector delivery of that as well. That, in turn, has knock-ons for the amount of sustainable transport viability that is in spatial development, which is a bit ironic because it is something that Better Connected tries to make some headway on.

Do they exist in the national planning policy framework and therefore in regional and local plans?

No.

That is interesting.

This is really challenging. The opportunity or the cloud on the horizon, in the rail sense, is the setting up of Great British Railways. You have two almost diametrically opposed tensions here where GBR has been set up to make things more consistent, which could take it towards centralisation and lots of national control, and devolution is meant to take decisions down to a local level. In evidence given to this Committee on rail reform, we did not think that the provisions in the Railways Bill were strong enough to direct Great British Railways to think that it is now in a post-devolved world—as opposed to British Rail, which existed up until the early 1990s. There is a real opportunity for Great British Railways to devolve a lot of local services. We have a situation in the Liverpool city region where we have control over the Merseyrail network, which serves a large part of the region. But areas such as St Helens and Halton get served by Northern Trains, which is not as frequent or as reliable as Merseyrail. We think there should be incentives and directions to Great British Railways to think about devolving control of those local services that should not be managed at a national level. The other point I would make builds on the example I gave about the port access road funding. There has to be a way of these national authorities having some degree of flexibility in how DFT and Government moves funding between them. The concept of combined authority funding now, for the major authorities, is around something called integrated settlement. So we effectively get all the funding streams brought together in one pot, but then we have some degree of flexibility locally to move money from housing to transport or vice versa, regeneration or economic growth. These national bodies are set up to operate in a very bespoke way, so I would not think that Great British Railways would ever volunteer money to National Highways or vice versa, but there needs to be a stronger framework from DFT and Government about how you flex money. The port access road is the best scenario; there is a need to do something and it could well be multimodal. Putting the budget in the hands of one authority does not work. There needs to be a better way of doing it.

GBR is an enormous opportunity, but we are not yet certain that that opportunity will be fulfilled. If we look at the way transport integration in Switzerland works, all 250 transport operators in the country come together and they make decisions collaboratively. Switzerland has a highly collaborative and consensual political subculture in which decisions are made by careful compromise. As you know, our system in Britain is a tad different to that, so we are probably not going to become Switzerland. How do we achieve the outcomes in a model that is traditionally highly centralised? The answer is you have to centralise the process of devolving and integrating. From a public transport point of view, GBR is the only organisation that is going to have the scale, resources and capability to become the anchor tenants of an integrated transport network. I ran a transport focus webinar recently and we had Nick Haller on, who runs customer experience for Swiss state railways. He said that its mentality is it does not think station to station; it thinks home to grandma. That is exactly where GBR needs to get to. It will not run all the buses or the shared bikes, but it has to absolutely feel that it is responsible for the customer journey from home to grandma, end to end. It is responsible for setting the standards and the integration mechanisms for bringing it all together. There are two problems with that. First, rail people do not think that way at all. They think station to station and have no awareness of what happens beyond their borders at the moment, because that is what they have historically been incentivised to do. Secondly, there is a very strong perception in combined authorities and bus companies that rail people look down on them and think they are more important. GBR has to completely reverse that way of thinking and say, “Hey, we are here to help you. How can we integrate your services better?” But in a centralised model such as the UK has, no one else is going to have the scale and capability to do it.

Probably most or all of us have seen that episode of “Yes Minister” where Jim Hacker gets foisted into the role of transport supremo and regrets it within about four seconds. There is a meeting in his ministerial office around the big table where all the different bits of DFT—DOT as it was then, I guess—gather and fight furiously like cats in a bag. Things have not moved on much. The absence of National Highways, as you rightly cite, and GBR, as we all keep on saying—these critical agencies with enormous budgets and power and remits in Better Connected—is worrying. We can try to tell ourselves that this is an opportunity for version two, but it is certainly a missed trick. It never ceases to amaze and appal me how you can have something potentially at the top level—net zero for example—but then you look at the specific remit the National Highways has, and it is not there. There is nothing about the efficiency of use of its network. It is required, in fact, to provide for whatever traffic rocks up on its network, which is in many ways the opposite direction to travel in. We are all then mystified as to why we are not making more progress on transport emissions, which are stubbornly stuck and are the largest emissions of any sector of the economy. So a version of this that has more teeth is absolutely vital and would be a great litmus test. Does it have stuff that shifts the remit in the case of National Highways, and in the case of GBR, establishes the remit in the first place to be very much home to grandma, holistic and therefore in a much better place to deliver on integration? Otherwise, we are in effect relying on people in bureaucracies pushing against the rule set that they live within, which is not going to deliver much.

Just to reflect on what Jamie was saying, I was in a northern stakeholder event a couple of months ago in the build-up to GBR, and it struck me there that it was thinking very seriously about not just local transport, but the local business opportunities. It seemed—at least to me—to be really actively engaging with its stakeholders. So maybe the direction is not coming through in the strategy and maybe we are not seeing it on paper from GBR, but I get a sense, in railways, that colleagues are actually thinking about these sorts of interactions.

It is really important and absolutely right that GBR has a duty to interact and co-ordinate with local authorities and other mode operators. I mentioned earlier that, of course, there is National Highways, which is key, but there is also the NHS. If you think about national organisations, they are absolutely key, and certainly they will be the biggest employer and GBR will be the second biggest employer. Those two need to co-ordinate, and they both need to co-ordinate with mail and command authorities.

Just as a heads-up, I am going to go to Richard Dilks with this one first, but if others have comments, I will then open up. The strategy covers things such as road maintenance and the national parking platform, but do you think it is sufficiently clear on how private cars should be part of an integrated transport network?

No. Private cars are not mentioned that much, which is very telling. It goes a bit to the PTE legacy point that Jamie made. I always remember someone saying, when we were in TfL’s headquarters, “Do you know, there is not one person in this entire building who is thinking about the car?” It is the single most used mode in London, never mind the rest of the country, so it is one of many omissions. We did a list of, largely, omissions, which I will share in writing with the Committee afterwards. We made it 64 of them, and we probably did not put enough in on the private car front. So as you rightly referenced, there are bits and bobs such as the national parking platform. One of many things that is typical of this document’s approach is that it gets mentioned in dispatches but there is nothing then on how are we going to—and who are “we” by the way—use the national parking platform, and to do what with it? I would argue that it potentially relates very heavily to the mobility hubs points that I was making earlier. We see the private car parking revenue tail wagging the local authority policy and practice dog all week long, week in, week out for years. It is getting worse because the net resource available to local authorities has been decreasing, and they therefore look more and more keenly at car parking revenue and defend it more and more trenchantly. The civil war aspect that lots of us have been touching on is another example of it, where you literally see warfare between the parking revenue folks—the commercial team, whatever they are called—and the transport planners who, generally speaking, all want to do things that are quite congruent with the rhetoric of this document, but they do not have much or any help on the incentives and the structures, so they often lose that war. There is a huge amount that is not said that is problematic. It is meant to be an integrated strategy, though. If we are going to be going into this space more in V2 we cannot do that in a siloed way. We cannot then have the private car section that talks about cars and parking, possibly insurance, and all sorts of other issues that it could get into, but which fails to relate and integrate those with the overall vision and other modes.

Jamie was speaking earlier about some great things that are happening in the Liverpool city region on rail accessibility. Park and ride is probably a huge part of that for you, as well as cars across the Liverpool city region more generally. Do you have any comments about the way that cars feature in this strategy?

I do not think they are particularly prominent, and actually, just moving away from private cars for one moment, I do not think taxis and private hire vehicles are mentioned much either, and of course they can be the very important last mile. They can take people from train stations late at night where there are security worries and someone wants to jump into a taxi to get home, so it is surprisingly silent on that. The big debate on cars is that there is obviously a push on electric vehicle charging and helpful Government funding to boost EV provision. But could we face a scenario in 10 years’ time when most private cars have become electric, which is great from an emissions point of view, but we then have clean congestion on the roads, and particularly bus services are still caught up in grinds of congestion on local roads because car use has not in any way diminished? So there has to be some sort of national discussion at some point around road charging, and how the financial regime works going forward. The other point, to build on some of Richard’s comments and the challenge earlier, is that we do not look abroad for examples. Germany, with its culture, has quite extensive use of car clubs. I cannot proclaim that we do that in the Liverpool city region. I was looking at an interesting stat recently that showed that most cars are parked up for, I think, 96% of the day. It is literally the most inefficient use of any transport asset there is. Any airline, ferry or train operator would not have their transport assets parked up for 96% of the day. On the basis of that, it sounds as if cars could be seen as an expensive luxury for many people in the future, if public transport is good enough and you use the carrot to persuade them over into public transport. There is more that the strategy could say about what the future vision for how we treat private car use is, and what more we can do to encourage people to think about car use either in a different way, or to migrate over to public transport.

That point about the percentage of time that cars spend parked is a really important one, but this is also something that is good to reflect upon. People often think of the Netherlands—as well as Switzerland—as an epitome of effective, integrated and sustainable transport. But in the Netherlands there is more car ownership per capita than there is in the UK—as it happens, they just spend more time parked. So there is a balance that we can strike in this strategy, or indeed in V2, between having an honest vision about mode shift, and saying that a greater proportion of journeys need to be taken by sustainable modes, and yet not being anti-car, so it would not get that sort of response as being anti-car. It is not about that; we need to be honest in that vision. Vans are not mentioned either actually. Registered car ownership has plateaued over the last decade, but van registration has not. That is really significant and keys into the absence of a mention of freight logistics at a national and local level, a lot of which creates congestion. I know that politically there has perhaps been awkwardness in recent decades about talking about vans, understandably, but we need to be honest about actually how vans play a role in the wider transport picture. There has been a lot of good work on increasing car size, if you want to call it SUVs or anything else. That is very important at a local level and from a safety perspective. There is good mention of the reduction of fatalities and casualties in the road safety area, but that does not really talk about the significance of increasing car size, which does have a measurable impact on people’s safety. Finally, to echo the points made about car clubs and shared mobility, we are all pretty clear that if you think about other technologies—how we consume media—we have been streaming media for a long time. Car clubs have been streaming for decades; we are really slow to catch up with that technology. In many respects the future is shared, clearly. It is very welcome to have guidance for local authorities for car clubs, but actually what would be better is a really clear vision that car clubs should play a much bigger role in our future integrated transport network, largely because of the point that Jamie made about how much time cars spend parked. That does not add up. If you put that together with how much people might need to use a car, you then have a vision where you say, “Right, this many cars makes sense,” without being prescriptive on number. You recognise that it is about sharing more as a society to achieve the goals that we want to achieve.

On the back of all those very good points made by both of you, there is a missing philosophical point that using a car does not mean owning it. This is looking again at version two and the work that this Committee actually played a key role in, in getting DFT and Ministers to take car and lift sharing somewhat seriously for the first time ever. This is ongoing at this point, but there is potentially some policy to come out of that later this year. So there is a wide open space here, and at the moment we do not have that basic philosophical point in. It is therefore a big struggle, and when you look at the local transport outcomes framework as an equivalent set-up, as it exists now, as we enter this new devolved world, shared mobility including car clubs and lift sharing are not on the list. There is no DFT dataset that includes them, so again it is not in the incentives and remit, as of yet anyway. That is a major missed trick for two particular categories of use case: one is people who cannot afford a car at all and would not have access to one, which is a point that sharpens in particular around EVs; the other is people who could but do not really need a second car or first car. The existence of car clubs enables them to use a car for those journeys, but also then tips them into enhanced public transport active travel use for the other journeys, where it is a marginal cause whether you take the car or not. If you have the car sat outside or very close to your home, you are more likely to take it than not. If you do not and you are using car club, you are more likely to make considered use of it. We have tons of detail about this that I have shared with the Committee before, but if you look at why people use that mode, they are actually very considered and logical about this. There is a major set of missed tricks there, for sure. It is also important to recognise that getting people away from private cars to an extent, and not being fully anti, as Michael said, is something that all of the countries that have been making a more successful fist of this—I have been running a list since Olly asked the question—have also done.

That is clear.

You came to us some time ago, Richard, and we were talking about car clubs and car sharing. Do you think Zipcar would not have pulled out of the UK if there had been a more coherent strategy, programme and plans for supporting its business model by Government and by TfL?

The last bit of your statement probably would have been the critical bit, rather than the former. In other words, just having a strategy certainly could not have hurt and might have helped somewhat. It probably would not have been the determinant, but if by strategy we are talking about something that has some teeth and meaning, and that gets into why car clubs are treated the same as private cars by the congestion charge scheme, or gets into the amount of fees asked in total by all London boroughs, for example, then it might well have done. That is data that nobody holds and understands, so nobody understood the boiling frog problem that was going on until it was too late, apart from people such as me, who do not have any power over it. Jamie rightly referred to Germany on car sharing, but we can look at a number of other European places that have both large and very strongly growing car sharing sectors. They have national policy and facilitation in the mix with that; that is not just some sort of organic accident.

That really gets to the heart of it: what is the point of all this, why are we all here? The purpose of transport is the maximum access to opportunity at the minimum cost. The cost is financial but it is also about pollution, carbon, use of scarce space and safety. Cars provide the best access to opportunity of all transport modes, but unfortunately, they also provide most of all those negatives as well. The purpose that we are here to achieve is the maximum of the good thing—the access to opportunity—with the minimum of all of those negatives. That is why, from a target point of view, access to opportunity needs to be No. 1, but as cars provide the maximum of those negatives, we also need a mode share target to ensure that we do not achieve that in the wrong way. Those modes achieve those things in very different ways in very different places. In a very rural area such as a tiny hamlet, cars provide almost unlimited access to opportunity with almost none of the negatives. In a congested urban centre, they consume vast amounts of space and provide very little access, because they immediately get caught up in traffic. We need to start with those very high-level questions: what is this for? And what are the high-level targets? It is then about making sure that those are cascaded down, not just within DFT but throughout the entire ecosystem, and actually incentivised. V2 really needs to be anchored in that. As we have been asked to give international case studies, I will just add a car one, which is Rézo Pouce, the French national digital hitchhiking scheme, which is now across the country. People hitchhiking in rural areas have to wait five minutes on average before they are given a ride.

Gosh, I remember hitchhiking, but it sort of fell out of fashion and was felt to be dangerous.

In France.

Yes, that is really interesting. Thank you.

You touched on some of this in some of your earlier answers, but by all means, expand on them. What barriers currently prevent better integration of walking, cycling and wheeling infrastructure with public transport? Do you feel the strategy sets out ways to improve that?

Part of our remit is on national highways with walkers, wheelers and riders. One of the key challenges we also see between bus and rail are things such as personal security, for example. Over the last few years, passengers have increasingly said that it is a more important factor than it was a few years ago. We have just published our “What Matters to Rail Passengers” study last week—again, very siloed; sorry, we would love to do cross-cutting ones—that shows an increase in priority from something like that being the eighth or ninth most important four or five years ago to now being No. 2. For some groups, that is even higher. We know separately from DFT studies that for women and girls in particular, at night that becomes a real challenge and concern about transiting, whether it is leaving a station or transiting from one place to another, such as from a bus to a train station, for example, when the need for good security is absolutely critical. Just going to some other comments from earlier, that will put people off even trying. If they have one negative experience, it is the sort of thing that can really hold people back.

The most relevant bit in our world is how impossible it is to get shared micro-mobility and indeed shared mobility more broadly. But your question was about active travel co-located at public transport interchanges; there is a whole raft of reasons behind that. It goes straight to the incentives point yet again, but in the real world, this is hard to do—not impossible; there are plenty of examples of it—but there is an even longer list of places that really should have it and do not. That has an impact on the existing flows of passengers using those rail or bus services, of course. It has a perception impact that is extremely important. Shared micro-mobility operator data will often show that the “look but do not book” tendency is strong and is about convenience, even down to whether you have to walk an extra 20, 25 metres or not, so it can be down to very fine margins. If it is not even a question of 25 metres but you cannot even see the stuff because it is several streets away as, for lots of reasons, it was not put in at the bus station. That has an enormous chilling effect and is certainly a huge deterrent. There is clearly an accessibility agenda to this, as well as safety agendas, as Alex was touching on clearly. This is far too hard to do, coming from the shared mobility perspective. There is then a wider ramification as well that is important. For that local area, those bus stops, bus stations, rail stations and so on should logically be bright spots on the map of where you are going to find some transport options, but as we have just been saying, all too often, they are not. That has implications within the existing passenger flows, but it also has profound implications for the whole area because to have a viable shared micro-mobility scheme means having a lot of places where you can pick up and drop off those things from. If you are suddenly effectively denied lots of the bus stops, all or some of them, the bus station or the rail stations, that is a big problem for that area. Those are then black spots, not hot spots, which means there is more pressure on other places within the area.

There is reference in the strategy to cycle-rail integration, which is good to see; in fact, in a sense there is more reference to that than there is to bus-rail integration. We have a top 10 commitments. There are 40 commitments; we think 10 of them are particularly good. This includes HC2, which is Healthy Communities 2, assessing the quality of cycle-rail interchanges. That is a very good thing to have in there. It is important to note, though, that the railways have been thinking about integrating with cycles for a long time. People will know places—including Marylebone station in central London—but local railway stations tend to have cycle parking even within the station buildings. So it is not that this is not happening. What is arguably more important is, in fact, the highways infrastructure outside of that, and again that is where one of these commitments is very strong. HC1 is the one before HC2, which is about creating a new approach to network management duty guidance that therefore lets the local authority become the highway authority, and assess the best use of that highway. Might it be a cycle path? Might it be a pavement? Might it be a road? At that point, you can start to think about integrating the infrastructure that gets people on their bikes to those railway stations. That is very significant. I should also say for active travel that there is a very good mention of the commitment to updating traffic signs, regulations and general directions. This evidently means that we can have simple zebra crossings. That is a good thing. Again, we can look at continental examples. Many parts of the world have zebra crossings at junctions or side streets; they do not all necessarily have to have beacons and be signalled crossings. You can just walk across and that enables prioritisation of pedestrian flow and active travel to railway stations, so this is not actually categorically linked to modal integration, but it is in there as its own thing, and that is going to have an extremely positive outcome.

I am just conscious of the time. Although you have touched on some of our questions in some of your answers, could I just ask both witnesses and members of the Committee to be cognisant of the time we have available for the rest of the session?

Don’t look at me.

For once. Okay, Jacob: ticketing affairs and data.

I like most of what is written in this document; it is the things that are not written that I do not like. The one thing I do not like is the fact that the DFT says its preferred standard for ticketing is contactless payment. We are doing exactly what we did last time. Back in 2012 I was the commercial director of Chiltern Railways, trying to roll out contactless on Chiltern Railways to integrate with the system already used in London that was just being rolled out. DFT was telling me that its preferred standard was ITSO smart cards, which were a 15-year-old technology. TfL rolled out contactless in 2012. It is now a 14-year-old technology and it has just become the DFT’s preferred standard for urban ticketing. We are always preferring the thing that was done 15 years earlier. Denmark is now in the process of rolling out nationwide digital pay-as-you-go ticketing. You use your phone, you press a button at the start of the journey, the GPS tracks you on every train, tram, bus, ferry you use all day, and it automatically debits you the cheapest fare for the journey that you have made. It will shortly take away the button at the start, and it will just run in the background on your phone and you literally never have to think about ticketing ever again.

If you have a smartphone.

If you have a smartphone, but the same applies if you have a bankcard. This solution is obviously already in place nationwide across the whole of Switzerland, and various regions of France also use it. You can scan it through the gate using your phone. Your phone provides you with visibility—it provides you with visibility of caps and information. We are again adopting a standard that is a generation behind. TfL’s contactless scheme was world-leading back in 2012, and it was an enormous achievement, but it is not the future. It is really frustrating that because we do not do international examples, everyone says, “I want London-style ticketing,” forgetting that London developed this only four years after the rollout of the iPhone.

The point about not everyone having smartphones or bank cards is really important. Anyone introducing these needs to be really transparent about the winners and losers—think about the losers and how to communicate to them and give them alternatives, or we just risk leaving people behind.

I echo the point that we need to be very careful about digital exclusion. The positive angle from the strategy is that the Government recognise that this is an opportunity to grab, and making travelling and paying for travel more simply must be one of the top priorities. That is positive, and obviously the increased public control of the networks through Great British Railways and combined authorities taking control of bus franchises means that there is less commercial interface with multiple operators and the multiple negotiations each time you try to modernise ticketing. So the conditions are far more fertile to take a giant step forward, but I absolutely accept the point that Thomas made.

Yes, it is quite important to recognise how significant the payments and information elements of this document are. It is right at the top there, and actually it has been the headline in the press releases. People were talking about the back-office technology. We really have to recognise how much good work is being done in the west midlands. Again, the west midlands is doing great work on combined authority partnerships, but it has also been pioneering this thing called Project Coral, and guess what? There is a target there to integrate Project Coral with GBR retail by 2030. That is extremely welcome. Of course, it sits third in our hierarchy. If we do not have the physical interchange and spatial development there, it is no use having integrated ticketing, but it is really important. Of course, I agree with Thomas that we are a long way behind in our technology in many respects, but to have it in there is extremely welcome. We certainly welcome that level of ambition.

We have been trying to roll out improvements, and the key lesson we have learned is how you take passengers along with you. We more recently introduced tap-and-go and account-based ticketing so that you get the best price deal, and EMV, which basically means you can use bank cards, credit cards, smartphones and so on. In all cases we did trial stages; the tap-and-go trial had 96% positive endorsement. Whenever you are rolling something out, it is not for people who already work in transport and think about these things day-to-day to give the feedback. You need very strong passenger engagement and involvement across different age and different demographic groups, and again, you have to think about the social exclusion angle, which should concern us all.

The very word “ticketing” is understandably used but it is also another thing that is a generation behind, in that if we imagine a world where you can do what Thomas was describing—and that Switzerland has done, in particular—moving seamlessly between modes, that would include shared mobility. It is not quite a ticket that is being used there, but a piece of expenditure. I do not mean just a physical ticket, but even the notion of it is something that this strategy would ideally be making further headway into dispelling and bringing the barriers down. Shared mobility is not integrated with other forms of sustainable transport at a journey-spent, ticketing-type level, on the whole. It is a major missed opportunity. You can see every tube strike where one option is suddenly taken away from people in a grand behaviour-change experiment on one level. There is then a massive upswing in shared micro-mobility use, in particular. Interestingly, a significant percentage of those customers are sticky, and they will then use shared micro-mobility much more than they did before. They were not going to have done that without the intervention. The analogy I am trying to draw is that if we had more things that surfaced these options alongside one another and, even better, helped people make seamless journeys across them and make the payment ticketing side of that simple, for sure we would grow the number of people using them. However, the reality we are in is that this strategy does not really get into that space much. We have just had the future transport zone funding winding down, so where there were a few pockets of examples of this that were public sector-funded, those apps have largely just been turned off because the funding does not continue. We have done the ludicrous thing of climbing up all the hard bits of the mountain to get something integrative in that area and to get people using it, and then have taken it away from them.

In general, from Richard’s earlier analysis of the who, how, why and what, throughout all this, it is all about the what, there is very little of everything else, including the who. You will have to see GBR step up to take on that responsibility for being the anchor of integrated ticketing nationwide because no one else has the capability to do it. I re-emphasise that that requires a huge cultural change from where the railway has been in the past.

For integrated travel and ticketing to work, which Jacob has touched on, it relies on good flow of data between all those involved. The Railways Bill this afternoon will hear that even within a single mode, there are lots of issues that surround the flow of data, particularly between GBR and the third-party ticket providers. When looking at the strategy, how do you feel about the Government’s approach to data sharing right across the sector? Is it an enabler or a barrier, or is it an opportunity? Should we be concerned?

It is an opportunity. I do not think the public transport sector has in any way been a paragon of virtue over the last 20 or 30 years when it comes to data sharing. If you look at the bus market, which is the dominant public transport market, there was no obligation for private bus operators to share data, unless it related to things such as concessionary travel reimbursement when they had to give evidence. The bus market has not been completely understood, analysed and evaluated in the way it should be. Also within the privatised railway, you then had barriers and, at times, not full sharing of data, or train companies that report things in different ways from others, so there is a real opportunity with rail reform. Thomas keeps making the point about GBR being the big all-consuming body that has the national base to almost set examples for data sharing. But there will have to be a big jump, because as I mentioned, we have a two-tier railway in the Liverpool city region, and we have all the transparency we want from Merseyrail because we are the concession authority, but we struggle at times with other train operating companies that are in control locally. So there needs to be a huge leap forward.

Is there anything else on that? Are we all happy?

There is a massive opportunity but that is because it is not happening very much at the moment, and yet again the incentives problem is there. Part of this is because we do not have enough data sharing going on, and it is striking that there is not yet a plan around shared mobility and data. We provide de facto the national datasets in this space, but to the point I made earlier, they are not in any of the DFT outcomes measurements or datasets, so our fear is: does this stuff get further ignored? But in that ignoring, and it not being in the public domain and transparent so that people can get their hands on it, there is a lack of understanding of the size of the prize for integrating. Also within that, there is what has worked well and what has not worked so well and then, of course, what we might want to do about that. So it carries really profound consequences. Not having an in-depth understanding of how people are moving around and across an area in a country can in no way be a good thing, particularly if we have specific ambitions in this space, which we surely do given net zero and the general narrative thrust of Better Connected.

Do you think that the strategy supports the technological innovation and interoperability needed specifically for integration?

Only in so far as to say there is not much in it, and therefore, by definition, no. We have talked about the enablers needing to be in place. I do not actually think that it needs to specify everything that needs to happen. Innovation is a really good example of something that could be left to local regions to develop their own solutions and to be able to try things. What this strategy should do is provide the targets, outcomes and the framework, and to fix the obstacles and incentives, and then let people get on with it. So I do not think it needs to provide much, and it does not.

Just one specific example of an area where technological innovation is critical is obviously the roll-out of EV chargers. We have pushed quite heavily for there to be more of a target for accessible EV chargers on the strategic road network. At the moment, Government are not keen on having that mandated and would rather allow developers to roll them out under market conditions. We do not think that is right. Sometimes there is a tension between allowing people to just get on with it, and then actually telling them and setting targets.

There is good mention of real-time information that is worth welcoming, but there is a risk. We talk about tensions, and there is increasing awareness, knowledge and research that relates to screen use and social media use, and particularly screen use for young people, the negative health impacts and impacts on their development. There is therefore a real case to think about how we use the technology we have available. Within the realms of real-time information, you have all sorts of things—e-paper and all sorts of different types of LED that can be used. I know that Pete Dyson talked about the perception of 10 minutes in the previous session. If you are waiting in a bus stop for 10 minutes and you have no RTI, it feels like 21 minutes. There could actually be a really good targeted approach to saying that, “We have a range of available technologies that can ensure people actually make the best use of that technology at bus stops, railway stations and tram stops,” and do not defer to saying, “Well, it will be fine because we have smartphones,” because there is a real conflict there in terms of the rhetoric and the understanding of research.

Is that apart from the safety issue of getting your phone out of your pocket to check it, when the information could be up in front of you?

Very much so.

I say again that the Government cannot do everything; they need to set a framework. The key thing is: how do we harness innovation and case studies from different regions? Ahead of bus franchising, we were working in a consortium with South Korean partners with whom we have a co-operation agreement on what we call the digital twin concept, which should allow us to more radically re-imagine and re-plan the bus network to improve it for residents. It is about all sorts of data—if you change bus routes, how many new homes or existing homes that brings closer to the bus routes; jobs, penetration into the education and health markets, and so on. Combined authorities and other authorities should be left to find these ways forward and bilateral co-operations. The question is then: how does that get shared? But I do not think central Government are responsible for driving all the innovation in the transport market.

The strategy says that the Government will “research into the barriers to, and benefits of, Mobility as a service.” In answer to various parliamentary questions, the Government have said that they have no comprehensive list of mobility as a service apps at the moment, or a sense of how much public funding is being spent on them. So is this a sensible thing for central Government to be doing? Or should we look at apps that are already in development and let the people who are developing them work out whether they have worked?

If I could achieve one thing today, I would love to drive a stake into the heart of this zombie concept. It drives me mad that we are still talking about it. MaaS came out of Helsinki in 2014. It was a guy called Sampo Hietanen’s idea that you have software as a service, you make one subscription payment, and then you can just travel around completely freely on every transport mode. It was a really interesting idea but it did not work; of course, what actually happened is everyone just used lots of taxis, which have a unit cost and so you cannot just have one subscription price. So they then said, “Oh well, never mind, we will take taxis and things that have a unit cost out, so it will just be buses and trains.” Then everyone said, “Oh, you just reinvented the season ticket.” So he said, “Ah no, but it’s got an app.” Okay, so there is an app for checking information and buying tickets, which is kind of where it has landed. An app for buying tickets and checking information is fairly obviously a part of good business for anyone who offers a service. Of course, we have to have apps for buying tickets and checking information. London has TfL Go. Most places have them and you do not need to call them mobility as a service because it is nothing like the thing that was originally called that name. We started talking about this in 2014: David Cameron was Prime Minister and we had not even had the Brexit referendum or the general election before the Brexit referendum. We have been talking about this for 12 years and nothing has happened because it does not exist—it is not a thing. It was an idea. It is brilliant to live in a world where we can allow good ideas to bubble up, but we also need to live in a world that accepts that they did not work and we can let them die in peace. That does not mean we should not have apps; of course, it is really important we should have apps. Why do I actually think this? Why am I going on about this? Why does it matter? Because while we see it as a thing, like Waiting for Godot, we wait for the MaaS fairies to come and solve our problems instead of just getting on with the normal day-to-day business of Government fixing the framework, the targets and the incentives, and local areas getting on with delivering the data, the apps and the integration to make it work. Please stop talking about MaaS for ever, everyone.

Is that in the context of open source data rather than privately held?

Yes, absolutely. Talk about that; that is crucial.

That is a recommendation then.

Perhaps I could bring one point to this, and I will not mention the word MaaS. You were reflecting that Government’s understanding as to even what ESA has been funding is not there, which is laughable and ridiculous, and that should be fixed. It is also important, though, that Government have an understanding of this point that central Government cannot fix all this, and about what is going on out there. This goes, in a sense, to the private car question and other areas where DFT is never going to directly control apps across the whole landscape for transport in this country. One of the more heartening points of detail within Better Connected, pointing perhaps to version 2.0, is that there is quite a lot of potential here to unpick and rethink how DFT looks at these sorts of things—appraisal, modelling, research—and quite a lot is potentially opened up there; it remains to be seen how it is done. I would love to see a world in which DFT has a far superior understanding of how people actually move around, how they want to move around, what the barriers to that are and so on. So in the app’s case, it is important that the DFT understands what the apps market and landscape is, and the bits that it has funded, if that has worked or not worked, and why.

It is time for some more jargon now. We touched on this earlier when you, Mr Ableman, gave your example of paying for travel in Denmark with your phone tracking and movement data. What safeguards are needed to ensure that that kind of digital integration does not worsen digital exclusion? Perhaps we should think of it the other way around: how do we tackle the fact that digital exclusion is a real issue in the UK—in poorer regions more than others—to make sure we get the benefit from the digital integration that you talked about?

I will briefly use the example of Rejsekort—Denmark’s national ticketing integration agency—which is putting in place a parallel card-based system for the digitally excluded, so everyone will have access to the entire service. It is not an incredibly expensive contactless scheme. The amount we are spending on installing over-specified readers at the moment, when we cannot really afford it, is extraordinary. So it has to be an objective; there have to be answers. Denmark has answers to its proposition. It is perfectly doable.

Any other thoughts on that?

Can I come in with a point that I do not think we have dwelt on very much? This comes back to affordability again. There should be some large national debates about the affordability of travel and bus fares. Last year, the Committee recommended intervening in the age group below 22, I think it was, to get a generational step change.

Yes, it was for free bus travel.

The whole concept of affordability and accessibility is huge, particularly for younger people and people who are socially excluded. One of the answers to the question is not just about having a card or some way that people can access transport; it is about lifting some groups out of having to pay fares. For example, our Mayor last year extended free travel across all modes to care leavers—younger people who have experienced the care system—giving them free travel across the region. With 2,000 cardholders, we have already had 400,000 trips using the cards. That goes hand in hand with whether there are some groups that you actually want to lift out of having to pay for fares. The whole concept around affordability and exclusion needs much more focus.

There is something on the notion of public, if you like. J. K. Galbraith would have talked about private wealth and public squalor. If you think about a world in which we have characters such as Elon Musk and so forth promoting certain forms of mobility and whizzing past polluted high streets with dilapidated bus stops, that is what Galbraith was talking about. So there is a case for us to make the case more strongly for public infrastructure. We have technology available. This quote has been attributed to Peñaloza—“The sign of a healthy society is one where the rich use public transport.” Everybody deserves to have access to the best quality technology, and if you see that as your kind of North Star, you really get beyond digital exclusion. It is about mobile phones again, and it is a really delicate balance to strike. We do not defer to the fact that, in theory, lots of people have access to these things, whether they are even good for you. We are actually saying, “No, that technology is available.” We obviate digital exclusion by investing in technology being in public places. That is really important. The bus sector and those who work on bus stop and railway station infrastructure get this. They really believe in it. So actually, there is something that needs to be articulated quite strongly, and it is about the public. That is quite important.

It is really important to note that the people who use cash are not a single group. We did a big piece of research last year that found four broad groups. I will not go through them all now, but in the right circumstances, many of those would use digital platforms. The actual group that just cannot or absolutely will not is quite small, but it is a big problem. Again, we did research in 2024, and one in three transactions at train stations in the most deprived areas was in cash. It is a very real problem but there are ways to mitigate that.

Just to build on that, the definition of digital exclusion is something that should be more nuanced and unpacked a bit. It is sometimes assumed to mean people are excluded because they will not, cannot—whatever the verb might be—use any digital option. But the reality is that smartphone penetration is at such a level that in fact it is about the nature of the digital option. This goes straight to the accessibility points that Jamie was rightly making earlier, which are quite absent from Better Connected, given that it is meant to be covering, as I understand it, the accessibility space from the Department’s point of view. There is to be this charter, but it will only be a charter. There is a big set of omissions around what serious work will go on to bridge that gap, recognising that there will still be people who, for whatever reasons, cannot use even those much more inclusive digital options, and then what do we do about that? But that is the right framing nowadays, rather than trying to think of one option for most people and then some sort of fallback for others.

We have touched on local authorities and governance but there may be a few other points to be made briefly, or we can move on to further topics.

Michael, you were talking before about Nottingham, and you used the phrase “strong political leadership,” which had allowed the workplace parking levy and then an integrated transport system. Do you think there is a danger that we conflate strong and stable in the sense that there are quite a lot of places—I would probably include Liverpool city region—where there is a degree of stability politically from one party? As we roll out devolution further, we are likely to go to places where there is less political stability. How will that work when you need that long-term decision-making to happen properly and fairly speedily among local authorities?

The conflation of strong and stable is an interesting notion in this place. What is interesting about Nottingham is that it had strong leadership and a supportive Minister, and what it did was quite visionary, but it did so against the grain, which as the Chair mentioned, was quite controversial at the time.

My point is it also had one party in power for a long time, whereas where we are moving to devolution now, we are going to have a lot of chopping and changing of political leadership.

Yes, to an extent, and I am sure Jamie will speak more to this, but what is clear thus far on the journey with devolution—and certainly for MSAs; yes, it is made tricky by unitaries being created in the interim—is that in every case, those mayors put transport at the top of their agenda, and that goes for the Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire as much as for the Mayor of Greater Manchester. That is always key, and again it talks to all the points we have made today about access to opportunity. This is not just about transport as transport; it is about transport as something else. That has to be the case for those mayors. So in terms of political instability, devolution is fundamentally a positive opportunity if we get it right, and that requires fiscal devolution to be mature and evolved, with local revenue-raising powers around it. But stability will come from mayors who combine integrated settlements, fiscal devolution, and a recognition that transport must be central, regardless of who is in power.

I suppose my question to Jamie is: could you have achieved everything that you have achieved if your constituent authorities were all entirely different political parties who did not agree with each other?

This feels like quite a dangerous question for an officer to ask. My question would be this. There is huge commonality in transport aspirations from across different groups within the region, regardless of political colour, because new transport facilities, new fleets or vehicles, and affordable fares—anything that seems a positive step forward for the public—are generally accepted. There are two issues of concern that could apply at any time if there was a change of political control. It strikes me that we have spent many decades arguing about the structure of the bus industry and the rail industry. We have now moved on because that is not what passengers are interested in. They are not interested in public, private and contractual regimes; they are interested in good services. The Government have taken steps forward with rail reform and bus reform, in harness with the combined authorities, to almost put that argument to one side and just concentrate on running the services. If the arguments about structure started again, that would not be particularly helpful for the long term. The other concern that I have, and again this could apply in any region, relates to the fact that in terms of trying to improve bus services—which, like rail services, and as Alex and Transport Focus’s survey show—bus passengers are most interested in punctuality and reliability and local authorities look after the local roads. So in terms of bus prioritisation measures—traffic prioritisation, bus lanes—do you get a scenario where you get one local authority regime that is in favour of doing all those things, and then four years later, a different regime or a different leader does not want to do it? With bus franchising, local authorities effectively become the Network Rail of the bus and road network, which would be alarming if you were trying to achieve stability, punctuality and reliability.

I will give you two case studies: in London, Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone could not be more different, yet there was a huge amount of continuity in their agendas. Mini Switzerland is in Derbyshire, which is controlled by a combined authority mayoralty of Reform and Labour, and people want access to opportunity. This is not controversial.

Can I just throw a point in? I absolutely agree: strong and stable are not the same thing. We engage with a lot of authorities where there is a lot of stability about shared mobility in their area, but there is too much stability because there is not enough shared mobility in their area, and in fact what I am trying to get them to do is to be less stable, in the sense of working harder with operators and so on to have more of it. This goes to the question that hangs around a lot of this about what the actual landscape will be as the devolution Act lands. None of us sitting here today quite knows that, of course. A shared mobility operator from another country described it to me the other week as the reverse devolution Act, which was very interesting, and I knew instantly what they meant. There is a hanging question as to what is actually being devolved in terms of power and on what basis. There is quite a big gap there, especially when you come to it from a shared mobility perspective into a sustainable transport one, as it stands. If that carries through and the existing policy set does not shift but we have these new strategic authorities created and so on, there probably is some risk of—absent a clear direction around what these areas are really meant to be doing on sustainable transport, particularly away from the metro PT heritage areas—it perhaps being more open to being pulled this way and that by politics or other forces.

Some of what I was going to ask has already been touched on, so in the interest of time, I will skip over some of it slightly. On local transport plans and guidance, how effectively do you think that the vision set out in this strategy aligns with the guidance for local authorities, including LTP guidance and planning rules?

Our contention at the moment is “not very” because when you read Better Connected, you come away thinking that there is lots of stuff that is not there and lots of frustrating failed connections within it—ironically—but there is the new headline stuff around shared mobility. You then look at the local transport plan guidance, published at the same time, and scour it for that same stuff, but do not find it. So inevitably, I get a bit worried about the points I just made about what the future landscape is actually going to be. There is one ray of hope, or maybe more, but the LTP guidance, as I understand it from what I have been told by DFT, is something that will be kept relatively fresh, so there is potential to update it relatively often. Therefore, there is potential to improve on it. We have put across our case to them on that and we are hoping to meet them about that whenever they want to meet us, but certainly at the moment, there is a problematic gap.

Does the strategy provide adequate long-term funding certainty for local authorities to plan integrated networks? Jamie, do you have any thoughts on that?

I do not think it does, and I do not think it intended to. I do not think it could usurp the normal spending review process. We are not disappointed at the lack of reference to funding. Some really positive steps have been taken in terms of funding. I mentioned earlier the Transport for City Regions’ five-year deals, which are for capital enhancements. The Government took a great step forward in bus funding. The local authority bus grant—previously the bus service improvement grant—was awarded on a 12-month to 12-month basis, so if you were investing in new routes or supporting fares, you only had a 12-month horizon. The Government have moved that to a three-year horizon. That is all very welcome, but there is absolutely no doubt that if you are trying to plan radical steps forward, whether that be in infrastructure, fares or ticketing, you need a wider planning horizon. We hope, for example, that the bus sector could be moved in line with rail, where Network Rail gets five-year funding deals. There are positive steps being made, but we need to keep pushing for at least medium-term certainty.

Do others on the panel have views about how the current funding arrangements allow for improved transport integration, or not, or what more could be done here?

There is a massive landmine in the middle of the funding of this document, which is really quite terrifying. It says that lower fares can be used to drive revenue and reinvestment. You hear this idea a lot recently. It is a bit like the Laffer curve idea that you cut taxes and you somehow get more revenue for the Treasury, which has never been proved. But people like the idea because it is much nicer to be able to say we can raise money by cutting taxes. We have now decided that the same is true in public transport: we can raise money by cutting fares.

We are in a cost of living crisis, though. Things are difficult for people.

I agree, but that is not what it says. What it says is we can cut fares and drive revenue and reinvestment—that is, we will cut fares, get more people using it and make more money, which is lovely, but in 25 years of working and running commercial departments for transport businesses, it never comes true. When you raise fares, you raise more money. When you cut fares, you get less money. So there are three options: first, this is true, in which case I would be delighted and would love to see the evidence. Secondly, it is not true, but do not worry, the strategy will be ignored, which is a good outcome for this but slightly worrying overall. Thirdly, this is not true, and it will be implemented, in which case if we are making the assumption that cutting fares increases revenue for reinvestment, we are about to significantly cut transport budgets. We need to be very honest about the fact that you do not raise money by cutting fares. You can achieve other outcomes by cutting fares but that needs to be paid for.

The elephant in the room is on subsidy. We will move on to the wider benefits of integration.

No, not remotely. It is a real shame and that is why V2 is such an exciting opportunity because this is the fundamental enabler. We constantly scratch our heads as to why only London is achieving benchmark productivity in the UK, and nowhere else. Even if you look at the London productivity map, you can virtually trace the tube network on it. If you look at the rest of the United Kingdom, the Centre for Cities has done comprehensive research on the connection between productivity and transport, and between transport and integration of transport. This is the thread that will enable us to level up, to use the phrase. But, unfortunately, the document is strangely silent on the scale of the potential opportunity to the nation, both in terms of growth, and therefore tax revenue—the investment that will then generate that tax revenue—and the fact that this is all anchored in access to opportunity. There is a huge opportunity for V2 to be much more explicit about the outcomes that this can achieve and the fact that we therefore need to invest to make that happen.

I agree that there is a big gap. Specifically, there is a big gap around shared mobility and its ability to help deliver this in an integrative fashion. What would that mean in terms of social, economic and environmental value? We have quite a lot of evidence on that but there is not even a goal, if you like, set in Better Connected around that. One of the points I want to make on this is about elasticity in the jargon. It is important to have a goal of driving economic, social and environmental growth through this. It is also important to recognise that that is about change, because if the existing system was delivering everything brilliantly, we would not really need a Better Connected strategy. There is an inherent recognition that we do not have everything brilliantly integrated today; we are going to have to do some new and different stuff. From our experience in shared mobility, some of that you can analyse and estimate, but there are limits to how well you can estimate that because, particularly in the case of shared mobility, things can really take off. If they really take off in a way that has not happened before, it is certainly going to be a tough job to model that on the existing evidence base. There is a point there about iterating very fast, understanding what is actually going on and what is driving success, and working with that, alongside being able to work on some more predictable things. Again, in the nitty gritty, there is maybe a little hope with the opening up of appraisal systems, modelling systems, areas of research and so on at DFT that they could get a better grip on this. So to answer the question, no, the strategy does not have this sufficiently at the moment.

We should move on.

Do you feel that the strategy adequately sets out how the Government intend to measure or evaluate the return on investment for integrated transport projects? I suppose that is a yes or no question. So can we have five one-word answers?

No.

Not quite.

No.

No.

No.

That is very clear, thank you very much. On that, do you have any thoughts on the metrics that the strategy sets out to measure progress and success?

I referred to this earlier. It would be really useful for us, as a passenger watchdog, to understand the passenger experience on an integrated basis. We have a great understanding of the individual modes. It hints at that in the strategy but we would like to see that extra level of detail.

It is not that what is in the list does not have merit. There are two problems with it: it is too short a list—there is stuff that is not there that I would like to see—and then the overall philosophical problem, again very ironically, is that it is not about integration. So there is a siloed list by which—magically somehow, but without a goal or initiative set around this—there is meant to be an understanding that develops as to how all this is knitting together, and what the sum of the parts actually is. I do not think that will automatically happen, so it will at least largely fail, which then raises the concern Thomas raised earlier—that it is okay because this will not be implemented anyway. How will we actually tell if Better Connected has been a success? It is partly about the data points made before—understanding ROI and so on. But if we are not really going to be able to do that, we are in a doom loop.

There are two points from me. Obviously, in terms of the return on investment and economic impact, it misses out the freight and logistics sector, which is a point that has been well made. Secondly, the document is not couched in terms of growth and productivity, which goes back to the previous question. All transport schemes, whether small or large, such as the Liverpool-Manchester railway that the Mayors of the Liverpool city region and Greater Manchester have argued for, are talked about as a growth scheme, not a transport scheme. There almost needs to be new terminology, as well as metrics that are more strategic and focused on growth and productivity.

While we might not have the desired outcomes that we would like to see in there in terms of connectivity, or mode shift, we have something very good, which is ELL1: empowering local leaders. We say that it should implement agreed outcome frameworks for local leaders. Some 70% of journeys are at the local level. A lot of this is going to be upon strategic authorities, regional and local authorities to actually deliver this. That is a very good thing. In fact, if those outcome frameworks are agreed and assessed on an annual basis, we could see a lot of effective measurement.

I am a big fan of devolution; I wish we lived in a consensual, participatory political environment. Maybe we will get there one day. Are there risks to fragmented local delivery given the devolution potential here? If the answer I assume you will give is, “Yes, but—”, what is the fulcrum? What do we need to be able to direct centrally versus delegate locally to make the wider economic and social benefits of integration work?

Please give brief answers because it is a big subject.

I am happy to keep it brief: fiscal devolution. Local revenue-raising powers are absolutely key, which keys into capacity and capability. We do not, in every case, have sufficient capacity and capability at the local authority level to deliver the integrated transport we need. A lot of that can come from local revenue raising. It is about moving power to those local areas. Those strong economies then come with the teams that can build those integrated networks.

As I mentioned, GBR has to be the centralised solution to this. Nothing else can do it; we are not a consensual country. Before we move on from the topic, I would just like to highlight one case study, which is the Oxford-Cambridge corridor. This is meant to be a national economic priority to create a high-value, high-jobs, high-housing-growth cluster. At the moment, it is set to not deliver anything like its potential because you cannot connect new housing in Tempsford and Bicester with science labs in Milton Keynes, Oxford and Cambridge on the existing highways network. Thankfully, we are not planning major expansions to the highways network. We are building a new railway. We are not putting in place the integrated transport to connect in and out of that new railway. This document is a test for version two quite soon. You need to be able to read this and say, “Oh, thank God, that is how we are going to make that happen.” If we cannot use the integrated transport strategy to give ourselves confidence that the extraordinary economic opportunity of the Oxford-Cambridge growth cluster will work, it has not worked. I suggest that that is quite a useful way of looking at this, partly because it is really important and partly as a test.

On the passenger experience between different devolved areas, if it is fundamentally different, it just needs to be really clear and transparent around things like ticketing, validity and so on.

The UK is an extraordinarily centralised Government, one of the most in the world of any comparable kind. It probably will remain so even after the devolution Act has landed. This is where the worry comes in that given the degree of centralisation, if the centre is not clear about what is meant to be happening, how, with whom and by when, and all that good stuff we have been talking about—in other words, it is kicked to the local authorities of various layers—that is going to be very hard because it is arguably getting some more powers and remits but not getting control over all its local public transport networks, for example. It is not getting the revenue-raising powers that Jamie touched on; there is a very long list of stuff it is not getting. So there is not an enormous shift under way and you end up potentially in a world where the centre has not been clear about what it wants and it has not therefore backed it up because it does not know what it wants, and local areas have some ideas of what they want but are not really empowered to go and deliver it. Therefore, you may end up with a patchwork quilt, of which the Oxford-Cambridge corridor is an interesting example.

I would not necessarily use the word fragmentation; there could be differentiation in what is provided locally, but central Government set a legislative framework, safety, minimum standards in things such as concessionary travel, and capital funding envelopes. There should be the power locally to do things differently, to go beyond concessionary travel minimum standards and improve the transport network for local needs. To that end, Michael has made a powerful point: could there be more in the fiscal devolution toolkit to help do that?

We will move on to accessibility.

This is another yes or no question but you can expand upon it in the answer to the final question. Are the needs of disabled passengers in an integrated system adequately reflected in the strategy?

Needs to an extent; the answer is no.

Qualified, yes.

If it has to be one word, then no.

Let us make it a sentence.

Then my sentence is: it has given itself a carve-out in the sense that it throws quite a lot at the charter and says we are developing the charter, so absent the charter, it is hard to come to a defensive conclusion. But given the Committee's excellent work on this—in particular the report from last year that, to summarise, showed just how bad things are—I remain unconvinced that a charter alone is going to sort enough of that out.

The needs are recognised, but the vision is not bought.

I would echo everything that has been said, and particularly Richard’s points. I was going to make the same points. The charter is promised but not actually in there, there is fantastic reference to access denied, and on the points that Jamie has made about level boarding, for example, what is the actual pipeline for level boarding? What is the pipeline for a new version of access for all for railway stations? It could be a lot clearer; it could be a lot more substantial than it is.

It clearly understands that there is a challenge and this Committee’s work has fed into that. It has set out how that might be taken forward, and we know RDG and the rail space are working on an app, and so on and so forth. It has given us a new duty, so the ambition is there, but let us see some more detail.

We have already covered this to a certain extent. Time is limited, so very quickly, for people who are on low incomes and people who are in areas where they do not have good access to public transport, is there enough in the strategy to support them?

We certainly welcome the extremely good new measure of transport poverty, AA4. It is an important thing to have at this point. It is also important to recognise the wider impact. Thomas is absolutely right about the pros and cons of low and high fares, but the wider impact is relative affordability across modes. There is good recognition of those on low incomes, and the point that two in five and the poorest demographics do not have access to a car is very welcome, but there needs to be a more nuanced conversation about relative affordability and its impact on greater use of sustainable modes.

Is there anything else?

It would be unfair to expect the strategy to sort this. A lot of the solutions must come at local level in terms of knowledge for the most deprived wards and areas within regions, but it links back to the debate around appraisal. Historically, lots of appraisal transport schemes were very focused, obviously, on volume of passengers and they benefited London and the south-east where there are very intense passenger volumes—less so regional urban areas, less so suburban areas, and less so rural areas. There is something around being able to flex the appraisal process so that capital investment and new routes are put into areas that will reconnect communities that have perhaps been forgotten or feel excluded from the transport network.

Local knowledge is one thing, but I guess you also need funding to make this happen.

Yes, but the capital funding settlements are quite healthy from Government. The question is: do we then direct those in the right way?

How does that translate to people on low income? Is that enough?

Yes, because with mapping tools, we are planning a new rapid transit network for the Liverpool city region. We can use mapping tools to work out what the increased connectivity will be for those in the indices of multiple deprivation, the most deprived wards. The question then becomes: can you construct an economic case to say that that is where you put the route rather than perhaps a growth area that is already doing well and you think you can unlock it further? There is something about local priorities and how you use technology to actually plan and penetrate some communities that are underserved.

I agree with both those points. The missing bit in the appraisal is social value, if you like, and that is not sufficiently weighted. That is partly how you end up with what you described in the question: areas that do not have very good public transport, or to go further, very good sustainable transport offers at all. Of course, if they are then areas that score more highly on indices of multiple deprivation and have lower incomes, actually they are areas that need more of those options, in particular to avoid transport poverty through enforced private car use. There will also be many there who cannot even afford that and are fundamentally excluded. The trouble is that the ecosystem of how investments are prioritised does not recognise that very well at all. I come again to the lack of clear vision around this. Shared mobility is mentioned in lots of places but nothing deeper than that. Shared can help with this but not on a market-only basis, which is by and large how it operates because it gets hardly any subsidy, unlike other countries.

It is quite expensive, as I found out last week during the tube strike.

The nature of what our appraisal system has done is sometimes under-noticed. Transport has withdrawn from where people live and focused ever more on smaller and smaller corridors that get higher and higher frequencies. This century we have spent about £100 billion so far on five major schemes: HS2, the Elizabeth line, the Victoria line upgrade, the West Coast main line and Thameslink. That £100 billion has added zero additional stations so far; two will open on HS2. It is all about making services that already exist in a very small number of places faster and more frequent, which therefore means if you live near one of those places you can only go to those places, which then increases demand. It is exactly what we complain about on roads: predict and provide. We do exactly the same in public transport; we have just never labelled it as such. Meanwhile, places where people live get fewer and fewer services. Rail services have not expanded and bus services have actively contracted. The appraisal model has driven that set of highly contracted and constrained outcomes. We need a fundamentally different appraisal process. The great thing is that the document says we are going to get one, which is brilliant, but of course if you do not have a clear outcome target at the top of the document, you do not know what you are appraising for.

France has brought in the legal right to access sustainable transport within a certain distance from your front door, no matter where you live. It is strong to have a legal right, but a goal that can then unlock remit change, and different ways of appraising things can suddenly mean there is a completely different map that you are trying to address than the current one Thomas was describing.

I do not think it has been fully rolled out yet.

It has not; that is correct. There are some parts of France that have not managed to roll it out.

Those are all the questions we wanted to cover at the beginning of the meeting, but I want to pick up a point that Thomas made right at the beginning of the session: the bus fare cap as a policy is actively working against transport integration. Could you say why?

It is a cap that only applies to not only single-mode but single-leg journeys. If you have a journey that is on a bus then another bus, you have to pay £6, not £3. If you have a journey that is one stop on the bus and then one stop on the train, you have to pay a £3 fare and then whatever the train fare happens to be, perhaps a £9 fare. By reducing the bus fare but only compensating operators for the fare reduction, not for multi-operator combined ticketing schemes, you are incentivising people to buy individual-mode fares and therefore disincentivising them to make the kinds of journeys that can best be made using multiple modes.

Thank you very much to our witnesses. Please feel free to follow up with us in writing anything you feel you have not been able to cover adequately in your answers this morning. That concludes today’s meeting.