Welcome to this morning’s evidence session. This is the first session of our inquiry into joined-up journeys. Our inquiry will examine how Government can shape transport services to meet the needs of transport users, and the journeys that we make in our daily lives. We will also be looking ahead to the Government’s promised integrated transport strategy. This morning we will be hearing from a panel of transport experts who will be providing us with an overview of the key issues. Could you please introduce yourselves?

I am vice president of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation. We are a charity, membership body and learned society involved in the planning, delivery and management of transport infrastructure.

I am a senior analyst at the think-tank Centre for Cities. We are an independent think-tank looking to improve the economic performance of the UK’s 63 largest cities and towns.

I am professor of transport governance at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds.

Damien is joining us on the screen this morning because of some transport issues.

Sorry I am not there in person; there were no trains yesterday from Devon. I am deputy director for transport operations, environment and waste at Devon County Council. I am also the national chair of the Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers, which represents officers around the UK managing passenger transport in local authorities.

We will bring you in when we bring everybody else in, as and when, so thank you for joining us online. I have the first question to kick us off. How important is integration for delivering an effective, reliable and affordable transport system in the UK? I will bring Damien in first so that I do not forget.

It is really important and crucial, particularly as a lot of my members cover rural areas, where you have less frequent services and issues with timings. If you cannot get that integration right and you cannot get those joined-up journeys, it is a bigger delay. It causes less confidence and it results in people thinking that they cannot use that sustainable transport option, so they opt for the private car. We have seen, in particular, a lot of longer journeys since covid. There is a second aspect of integration in rural areas, which is also really important, about how local authorities and the public sector integrate their transport requirements together. There are issues around this when you do not have frequent services, and you do not have the option to walk or cycle those longer distances.

Across the range, if individual journeys do not join up—that might be within modes or between modes, between different train operators, between buses and trains or between walking, cycling and trains—at an individual level people do not have opportunities to travel. Uncertainty breeds deterrence. Anxiety deters people from travelling or to choose a different mode, which means they do not meet their own needs. There is an economic impact on businesses and individuals, and a big disparity in equality of access to transport. Joined-up services affect people with disabilities. People who are older or with children are affected much more, and people on low incomes have fewer choices.

I would like to focus on the economic angle, particularly in our large urban areas. The function of transport in that respect is to connect people to economic opportunities, jobs and education. If you look at our big cities, we know that they underperform on productivity, and a big part of that, particularly our cities in the north of England and outside the south-east, is due to underperforming transport networks. The integration aspect is important because the network size is similar to European cities, but the number of people who can take easy journeys to reach the centres of the economy in those places is a lot smaller because the system is fragmented across modes. There are different levels of governance, so integration, making the network function as one system and making it more efficient by dealing with bottlenecks and avoiding duplication, is really important. If you are going to connect more people to these opportunities, and if you are going to deepen the labour markets in these big cities, you are going to get all the benefits associated with that, such as better matching between employers and workers and more exchanges of ideas. You will then see productivity rise.

This is a major opportunity. We are still in a time when the majority of our bus services cannot talk to each other about what time they are running or what their fare levels should be at. We have to seize this opportunity, coupled with the plans for rail. It will allow us to begin to behave in ways that European cities, which we would hold up as good benchmarks, do their planning for integration. We need to be ambitious, but we also need to be realistic. Some 93% of journeys are not multimodal. In London, it is 82%. There is scope to improve but obviously, within London, you have a much richer network of opportunities for people to interchange. We can certainly make things a lot better, but this is not going to be a panacea for everything in the transport sector. We also need to be aware that the commercial imperatives have stripped out a lot of the things you might do to integrate between journeys. Therefore, if we want a better quality of service, we may end up bearing some additional costs. There are still some institutional barriers for us to work through, which I am sure you will want to talk about.

It is three layers of infrastructure. The physical infrastructure means the individual modes and points where they connect, but also the points at each end. We forget the little bits of it. There is no point in your bus being accessible if there are no dropped curbs to get to your bus. There is no point in being able to afford to take your three children on the train if the loo on the train does not accommodate your children. It is the physical built infrastructure and the connections between that infrastructure. That is the built stuff. There is the digital stuff: the ticketing, the platforms, the timetabling and the co-ordination for both planning a journey and within a journey. When you are delayed, how do you find information? Ticketing information or passenger information that is real-time and not just a digital display of a timetable, which a lot of them are. The other layer of digital infrastructure is whether there is wi-fi in the station. Is there information on a train? Is there access to information? So it is the three layers: built infrastructure, virtual infrastructure that facilitates ticketing, and information, both for planning and during a journey, as well as the wider aspects of certainty and understanding.

I am happy to build on that and echo the digital ticketing side of things. This is ticketing and timetables. Like you said, it is about getting people from A to B, almost irrespective of what mode it is, which will allow greater synchronisation. I would like to add something on the integration of governance. When we are talking about integrated transport, it is really important that we know what level of geography we are talking about. An integrated transport network at the national level is going to be very different from one at a city level. We see this in city regions, where mayors and combined authorities have relatively unified powers over their transport networks. What this allows them to do is plan strategically, with the network as a whole in mind, rather than think about fragmented, individual modes that may duplicate and compete with each other. It is about getting the network to work as one system.

Overcoming a co-ordination problem.

The one brand, one network, one ticket approach is really important, but we need to be careful when thinking about ticketing. There is payment. One platform for paying makes it nice and easy. That is not the same as having integrated ticketing, where you have capped fares for all the different modes of transport. For example, the system in Berlin is that you have integration across bus and rail, but they have a payment system where taxis, car shares, coaches and so on can be paid through one platform. That is not integrated fares. We have to be really careful of what we are describing as integration. One bit of clarity I would like to see in the White Paper is how far we are going and what we are enabling in different areas.

Building on and differing slightly from what has been said already, one really important thing is reliability. You can change the way bus services are governed but you still have issues with congestion. It is really difficult to get those priorities in on the network, particularly when you have congested cities such as Exeter, where you do not have the road space. You need to ensure you have the system in place to give confidence that journeys are going to run to time, and link it back to real-time if there is congestion or a major incident. Yesterday, the railway was really good at informing on what was happening, but you do not get that across all modes. Incidents happen on a daily basis. People will look at an app, but the information given will just be the timetable times and not the issue happening on the ground. That comes back to a lot of the technology being used in the industry, which is not always up to date. The other thing about stepping stones is that some of us have tried to put services in place at an early stage, particularly when you have new developments. When you have a new development and can put a railway station and link buses in, you get a higher level of people using sustainable options. You can have cycle lanes and all those kind of things. When you get developments where that is not put in place, you tend to get higher reliance on cars because you do not have the infrastructure or network of integrated services available.

This is a really important point. We wrote a report four or five years ago on shared mobility and, in particular, National Highways has an important role to play in terms of integration. Coach journeys are really long because they detour off the motorway into the city and back out again. You would think that we would have integration at motorway junctions, for example, but sometimes it actually works the other way. It is trying to keep things away from motorway junctions to keep moving. So National Highways should definitely be on the hook here and think about the role of its network in facilitating more integrated journeys. It spreads right across our thinking in terms of suburbs. Generally, public transport interchange is thought about in terms of the main bus or train stations. There is a lot of informal interchange that can and does happen in our suburbs, and we do not invest in that. Things such as mobility hubs can be a way forward, but I do not see the ambition for them here in the UK that you see elsewhere in Europe. We have to go beyond bus, rail and even bike integration in the White Paper.

I will take that from the angle of a truly integrated transport system having to consider all modes of how people get around. In some cases, that means balancing the trade-offs between public and road transport. What we know in our urban areas is that, if you want to move people from where they live to where they work, the most efficient way of doing that is via public transport. It takes up far less space, and space is a limited resource in these places. If you are thinking about improving public transport, a better joining up of buses and rail, then you have to consider what people’s outside options are and whether they fit with our wider goals. For example, we did some modelling at Centre for Cities looking at taking steps towards integration in our largest cities outside London. You see a big increase in the number of people who can reach city centres within 30 minutes. In places such as Sheffield and Leeds, it is about a 50% increase. However, if you look at the number of people who are brought within the accessibility area, half of them would still find it much easier to drive. If you are concerned about bus speeds, and if you are trying to get more people into your city centres to access those opportunities, at some point you have to consider how to balance those trade-offs in your transport strategy. London is a really good example. Even with the best transport network in the country, you still have to have measures that disincentivise car use in the most crowded places.

You asked if we know enough, and it is two-way. The CIHT has made the point that providers need to understand what users need. That is the journeys they make now and the journeys they would make. We know there is a lot of deterrence from taking jobs in a certain location if the public transport journey is unpredictable, uncertain or uncomfortable. Do we feel safe? They are all deterrents to a journey. Do we know what journeys people make and what they would make? Do people know what exists? I often find people’s perception is that public transport is dreadful because information about it is not integrated and poor. They do not understand that there might be a really good, joined-up journey option for them but they do not know about it or where to find it. Google Maps is the default way of finding journeys, but it is not very good at showing that you could drive to this area or park and then get a train for most of the journey, or that somebody could drop you off. That is not a thing in Google Maps. The systems do not work, but the private sector has delivered more than the industry delivering it.

Quite often someone’s car breaks down and they are surprised at the level of service that is available in some areas, particularly in rural areas where you have seen improvements in buses and connections with trains. Sometimes we are not very good at getting the message out about what is actually there. You also get modes that compete against each other quite a bit, rather than work together; train versus the bus or cycling is the best way. We need to work out a way of bringing everybody together to look at it as one system, because sometimes it does not feel like that.

Before we move on to the next question, I want to pick up on one of the themes that has come through. It is around people having to choose to drive because they need to get somewhere. Kate, you have just said that sometimes people might drive to a certain location and then get the train. What thought have you given to the costs of parking at train stations? Often you will hear a family say, “It is too expensive to park at a station for four days, so it is easier for us to drive and park somewhere else.” Do you think more needs to be done on the cost of parking at interchange places where people are choosing to do that, perhaps if they are coming in from a rural area? Damien, I am assuming you are familiar with Cranbrook station, just outside Exeter, where you can actually park for free. It encourages people to use that railway station. What thinking have you done around that? It is something I have been considering recently.

The logistics of parking—the accessibility and pricing structure of parking—is important, but it needs not to be the only choice. If you do not have a car, that should not be a barrier. People need to have choices. People often want to travel in a fully sustainable mode; they would rather get a bus to a station. If, like my hometown, the nearest bus stop to the station is a 10-minute walk away and you cannot make that 10-minute walk, that journey is not accessible. If people want to walk or cycle, but there is no safe active travel infrastructure to the station or interchange at each end, it does not matter how good the public transport bit of the journey is because it is the joined-up aspect that does not work. Parking is important and can be the difference between whether somebody would use the train or not. Also, one person making a journey is very different from four people making a journey. Different things will work for different people and different places. The planning information, ticketing and pricing structure, and the delivery of the infrastructure, matter just as much, because if people cannot get information on their own journeys, they will drive.

I was just going to use another example from our area. Yesterday, my plan was to drive to Tiverton Parkway. I could have driven to nearer stations, but that station has reasonable parking. People make longer journeys from Cornwall, north Devon and such areas because it is in a good location and has good connections to the motorway. Therefore, people drive long distances to get to that point. What we need to do is develop the sustainable options to link into a station like that so that you get that choice and do not have to drive there.

The other challenge is making the journeys more efficient, which is why people drive to that station. It is a quicker way of doing it.

Yes, and it is two hours from London. You are not rattling around the slower stops.

Obviously, joined-up journeys are going to look different across the country. We represent different areas with different levels of integration. What would you say well-integrated transport looks like across urban, suburban and rural areas?

I will leave it to Damien to talk about rural areas, because that is where the more drastic consequences of poor integration are felt. Missed connections are super painful there. Arguably, the mayoral combined authorities are beginning to show signs that they are thinking about what this really means to users. Things such as “last bus home” guarantees if the final bus is cancelled, and so on. In terms of what it could look like, I mentioned Berlin earlier. West Yorkshire is 2.4 million people, and Berlin is 3.7 million. They have over 300 mobility hubs across communities built into new and old housing projects; we are struggling with the business cases in West Yorkshire to get five implemented. There is a vision there, at scale, for what they would like the system to look like and people to experience. We need to have some vision of where we are going that is of the right scale. Otherwise, we are going to be making small but important improvements to the system, but we need to be a little more ambitious than that. I worry a little that we get bogged down in the business cases for incremental improvements without really setting out what we want our systems to look like. I will save talking about trams and devolution until later.

Could you just clarify, for the record and anybody watching, what you mean by the mobility hubs in Berlin and what you are trying to get in West Yorkshire?

These are focal points for interchange. They will all have some form of shared car or van service. They have shared bike and scooter schemes, as well as taxis. It is also a point of public transport interchange. Obviously you invest around those to make them visible, with waiting areas and so on. It becomes an obvious part of the system. Everyone can see it. You know where you need to go if you want to pick up something else. The importance of that approach is that it is not just about the bus service that is there. A lot of our services are targeted at the middle of the city and, if you do not want to go to the middle of the city, you need different options available. They are making those options obvious to people so they can start thinking of it as a system with lots of different things to it. That is why we could fall short if we do not have that.

Are you basically saying that it helps with the first and last mile, or in that case kilometre?

It can be the first and last mile but, obviously, car clubs and taxis can do relatively extensive journeys.

Damien, did you want to come in? Perhaps you could talk a bit more about rural areas.

In rural areas, obviously, the voluntary sector plays a key part for people who do not have their own transport, and it is how we link them into the system. They tend to be governed towards helping the frail, elderly and people who cannot use conventional bus services. We have a lot of young people and others in rural areas who cannot access services, particularly for education. Some areas, such as Lincolnshire, have been very successful at demand-responsive transport feeding into main networks, but that can come at a high cost per passenger. When you look at what local authorities spend on transport in rural areas, it is massive. Councils have school transport budgets of £50 million. If we can work out how to combine all those needs into an integrated network, and I am including the requirements for the NHS, we may be able to provide some transport for access to education. You have vehicles available to do things in other parts of the day to feed people into the main bus network. That is what we promote, and it is what we are always trying to do. However, having people with different levels of responsibility in different organisations can sometimes be a barrier to achieving that.

I will comment more on the urban angle. Your point is correct. We have to think about it differently for different places and geographies. One aspect is realising that, in rural areas, car travel for many people will remain the main mode of transport and the best way of getting around. Obviously, there is accessibility through rural bus service provision but, because of distances and how sparse populations are, that will inevitably come at a greater cost. The focus on urban areas is important for the reasons I have highlighted. We know that our big cities underperform on connecting people to economic centres. The integration imperative in those places is important too, because you have so many different conflicts in terms of space, such as developable land versus giving road space to allow people to get around. You have lots of different transport modes intersecting: local trams, metro, buses, road users and other things. The other distinction to make is that we have big cities where we know transport connectivity is a real constraint. It basically reduces their effective size. They are basically half as big as their population suggests because people cannot access city centres. What that looks like in smaller places, in medium-sized cities, is that you need fewer high-capacity transport connections and, in those places, buses are really important. Buses are still really important in big places, as they fill in the whole network. If you are thinking about what levers to pull on integrated transport in our medium-sized cities, getting those bus networks filled out is the way to go.

Integrated transport means different things to different people in different places. You have rural areas, and Chris Whitty talks about coastal areas. If you map deprivation, life expectancy and access to transport, they all intersect. That is not just rural versus urban, it is also around coastal versus other places. Suburban places need different infrastructure from others. From a return on investment point of view, as well as from an individual access to transport point of view, we need different things in different places. That is a mixture of park and ride, responsive transport and different accessible transport. We have to consider different places in the country, as well as different types of place. The nature of integrated transport is different in the north and the south, for example, even within cities and rural areas.

My constituency, which is semi-rural, does not have a mayoral authority. To your point, Greg, they can often act as a co-ordinating authority. We obviously do not have that. There are two towns, which are not well connected to each other, and villages that do not have an integrated transport system. What programmes or interventions do you think would help non-metropolitan areas such as mine?

My colleague, who I developed the evidence with, might be able to provide more detail. He has been working with the Welsh Government, who obviously have control over rail, are taking buses into franchising and are thinking very hard about co-ordination in these sorts of places. Franchising does not just have to be for big cities. There are real opportunities to lay down a core network of the important social and economic functions of public transport in those areas, and decide whether the right thing to do is fund that through a managed franchise set of services. So there are models, even within the UK, of how it can be done differently. Having said that, there has been some really good co-ordination of rural transport in Devon. That is the trouble with the UK system: you cannot design one thing that fits everywhere. There are exceptions that have been shown to work.

One last thing to remember is that, with local government reorganisation, we are going to get a large number of new transport authorities. If you split a county-level organisation into multiple unitary organisations, you split what might already be a very small team into very small individual areas. One thing that is really important, which I am keen we have, is planning at a larger than individual highway authority level—whether it is public transport, active travel facilities or more cross-boundary journeys—so that wider high-level planning is more efficient and more effective in supporting joined-up journeys.

On local government reorganisation, it is key that the boundaries match local economic geographies. You do not want boundary-splitting areas where there is a lot of cross-movement between people, whether it is for work or local journeys. Combined with what we have seen with the Bus Services Act 2025, which will make things such as franchising much easier in those local authorities, it will begin that matching between governance on the transport network and allow places to make those decisions with the network in mind. If they decide it is important to have those connections, which may not be provided by deregulated bus services, that is their prerogative and they can do so.

If local government reorganisation is not thought through, you could be in a position where you break up integrated transport units that cover all aspects of passenger transport that link with highways. The greater the number of boundaries, the greater the fragmentation of services. You have an opportunity, with combined authorities, to look at things at a higher level that crosses over those boundaries. However, you have to be careful that, with anything left that a local council is still responsible for, you can still retain that integration because, obviously, that provides better services for people and saves significant amounts of money as well.

A lot of the evidence we have received, and it has come up in the conversation so far, has emphasised the need to put transport users at the centre of the design and delivery of integrated transport, and of the need to make sure we engage those users and design the integrated transport networks to meet the needs of the communities they are intended to serve. What does that look like in practice, in terms of putting users first? Are there examples of good practice, whether here or abroad? You have said a little about Berlin already.

It is really important to engage with those users and, obviously, it is done on a national level. Locally, it is engaging with the youth council because young people are, for us, the most active in terms of wanting to see improvements in sustainable transport. It is also looking at communities on an individual basis and what their needs are. What we do not want to do is design services and then tell them that it is what they need and want. We will then get better options. There are pockets of good practice around the country where that is happening. It is also important to engage with major service providers, such as the health, education and business sectors, so that you are matching the two together. If those services had been planned better to start with, it might have meant you were able to have more sustainable transport options for a lot of those journeys.

It is both the organisational structures that deliver it and the physical infrastructure that is there. That is what delivers seamless, reliable, and accessible journeys. The lived experience of people is about how the change actually works and if it is focused on the user. A lot of health providers joke that hospitals would run better if you just got rid of the patients. We sometimes think like that.

There is a “Yes, Minister” episode along those lines.

It would run better if you could just get rid of the people who are travelling. We tend to organise things based on our own operation rather than being user-focused. If it is user-focused, it will meet the needs of all people, in all situations, at all times. If you work in hospitality and you are finishing at 11 pm, the fact that there are no bus routes means there is no option. It needs to be all those things. The proportion of people with disabilities is much bigger than we think; it is not just wheelchair users but all the different dimensions of things. The seamlessness needs to work for all those people. If you arrive at your bus stop, it does not matter if there is real-time passenger information if you cannot access it visually.

The best way to align user needs and integrated transport networks is through governance and accountability. That is exactly what we see in the mayoral-led transport systems. I will take Greater Manchester as an example. I have seen internal analysis saying that the most important thing for its residents, in terms of how the transport system functions, is does their bus turn up on time? Is it reliable? Can they count on it? Part of the reason why Greater Manchester is looking into user needs is because, if users are not happy with their transport system, they get to go to the ballot box in local mayoral elections and make their voice heard. If you want to align those incentives, having that democratic accountability for the level of where a transport network is operational really helps. That allows the mayor to make decisions on what kind of concessions we should have on our network to improve accessibility for certain groups. You can make local-level decisions on bus fares rather than a national cap. You can decide, “Bus travel is more important in our place, so we are going to lower that cap.” In another scenario, “We know that we need the funding to reinvest in our local system, so we want fares above the cap.” Just making all those decisions, at a political level, will help to align those user needs.

I will go back to my first statistic: only 7% of people make joined-up or multimodal journeys, at least at the moment. In the work we are doing for the INFUZE Project, which I run, we are looking at building these visions with a wide range of different community groups, and we are working with schools. Some things to emerge are known to us but are perhaps marginalised by the way companies have been thinking about profit rather than social value. Personal safety for a wide range of groups, particularly women but also younger people and other minority groups, comes out as so important to whether people are willing to spend time in places and move between different forms of transport. That, to me, is really critical. We see interchange as a time penalty. That is how transport thinks about it. People do not like waiting. People ask us, “Why is interchange not more integrated in the stuff we need to do anyway, so that we can do other activities while we are there?” Children talk about it being a place where they are going to spend some time, so why is it not more fun? LNER has just done two family-friendly rooms, one in York and the other in London. That could be standard practice. “This is how we do interchange. This is not unpleasant. It is something that we are encouraging people to do.” I find the interchanges of Dutch Railways a little clean and clinical, but they have a standard design approach to them so that everyone understands how it all works. I know we have local character in our different stations, but that is one thing we could do. I would echo Kate’s point that, because of our infrastructure, we are not going to be able to serve everyone equally. We need to work out ways to make the experience more equitable for people with disabilities. I really like the signage that you see in rail stations. Why is that not on all our bus stops? Let us make those innovations happen across the whole system so that it feels like one system. I am going on to something else: the bus network.

A lot of things are happening nationally around transport poverty. Work is taking place in a lot of areas to identify solutions relevant to geography, demographics and infrastructure. Looking at it from that perspective, we can see how we can help the groups impacted by transport poverty. It is also about giving tools to those people who may need additional support to use transport in a sustainable way. For example, through independent travel training and all those kinds of things, we can give people the confidence to travel on the network.

We have already touched on this to some extent in terms of the UK’s transport infrastructure, but what are the practical things we need to do to make sure that UK transport infrastructure supports better joined-up journeys? Kate, you have mentioned it already.

For it to be built up, it needs to be meeting all those needs: the individual’s mobility, information, availability and planning across the different modes. Give it those practical and real opportunities or it will not be getting that return on investment. We forget sometimes that economic growth, air quality and noise affect whether people will choose to make journeys by different modes.

If you think about improving your transport networks, you can make things bigger. You can do big-ticket infrastructure expansions. Integration is more about making what you have better. That is not to say that it does not require any infrastructure, of course it does, but it is a relatively infrastructure-light intervention that you can do to really get the most out of your transport networks. A big aspect of improving transport in big cities is increasing bus frequencies and reliabilities. When they come under public control, as all our big cities are doing and Manchester has already done, it will require more buses and things such as the local ownership of depots. On the infrastructure side, it makes integration quite a good intervention to do in the short term because you are going to be spending less on infrastructure than headline-grabbing “Let us build a new tram” interventions.

I guess I am trying to find out what we physically need. I remember in a previous life being told that there was this brand-new, shiny mobility hub, which is a phrase I hate. Having dug down on it a bit further, it appeared to be a bus stop plus a puncture repair kit. I am sure Olly will be pleased about having a puncture repair kit alongside the bus stop, but it did not really feel like a brave new world of transport integration. What are the practical things we should be doing to create these places where people will be changing from one type of transport to another?

It can be those relatively boring interventions: it is bus stops; it is making people feel safe; it is unified branding across the place so people know that they are on a network and can use different modes. I do not think it has to be particularly eye-catching on that front.

We risk overlooking an opportunity to invest in parts of our local communities and suburbs. When York got the e-scooter trial, it had an opportunity to rethink. We are putting these e-scooters in our suburbs around local shops; we could invest in raising that area and making it a focal point. Instead, what we did was allow some scooters to be chucked along the side of an already tired bus stop. That, to me, is not a mobility hub; it is just giving a bit of pavement space to someone. There are investment needs, but for me, the greatest investment opportunity is that most of our multimodal journeys are walk-rail or walk-bus. If you look at other countries, there are an awful lot of bike-rail or bike-tram journeys. We did a study of three corridors in Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire, and only two of the stations had really secure, lockable and well-lit cycle storage facilities. Some cycle storage was done to standard, but you could see that people felt it was risky to leave their bikes there. Then, when you walked within a mile of the station, the cycle infrastructure was not properly integrated. There is no point in having great bike storage if the network to the station is not right. There are some investments, such as that sort of thing, where it is within our power to do better. If we have clarity of plan and purpose, we should be aiming for that, but those things are not free either.

It does not tend to be exciting stuff, but there are a lot of little things that can be done around an area to improve that infrastructure. Councils with bus service improvement plans can put in better bus shelters, both where they were and where they were not before. You can look at how you can create those hubs for people to cycle or walk to. When you are trying to provide transport for people, there is a lot of resistance on the journey from home to the bus stop. People want to get in their car and get to that point, so do anything you can to improve safety and confidence. For that bigger infrastructure, it also comes back to what I was saying earlier: when you are creating new developments, build it in at the start and take the opportunity to put in the infrastructure that people can use.

We have looked at physical infrastructure, so can we now go on to technology? What kind of role can technology play in better facilitating integrated transport? Let us start with Robert for a change.

Ticketing is obviously a big one if you are thinking about multimodal journeys. A lot of our research looks at the journeys people take on their usual commute within big city centres. Ease of use and seamless transition are a big part of that. If you are messing around with lots of different tickets for different modes, if you have to pre-book them online and if you cannot just tap in and tap out, that is an issue. Similarly, but separately, it is about the cost of those tickets. If taking multiple modes adds cost, that can become prohibitive for some people. It is having the technical infrastructure in place, say, to cap fares. These are the powers that our regional and city mayors are starting to wield, because they realise, looking at it from a whole network perspective, that these are the interventions that make sense when you think about it at that level.

I totally agree that ticketing can be a route to a more seamless pattern of travel. We have to ask: how are we integrating the fares that sit behind that? Rail and bus fares, in the systems we have, are not well aligned at the moment. Are we levelling up the cost to have a common fare for both modes of transport, or are we bringing it down? That comes with a cost. Simplifying how we pay is not the same as simplifying what we pay. These details really matter to your inquiry. It is a personal bugbear, but can we just make it really obvious to people how tap-on and tap-off works? I do not understand how it works on the buses in my area, and I have two degrees in this stuff. The role of AI and so on, we need to know what the purpose of integration is in order for technology to help us deliver that. I would rather AI is focused on improving our service design in the first place. People want stuff that is simple and works; they do not want AI to be working on an algorithm to tell them how to deal with stuff when it goes wrong. Sometimes things do go wrong, but we need to focus on making the system work for people more of the time, first time, so that they have a good experience.

I agree with you on tap-on and tap-off. Also, you do not know whether you have to tap off because, in many places, it is just tapping on. Damien?

The Peninsula Strategic Transport Board has done some work on integrated ticketing, which obviously links with Project Coral for local buses. We want to extend that to local rail, and it is taking a long time to get to that point. I feel that the technology is potentially there to be able to do it, because it happens when you go to London. I do not know. We just do not seem to be able to get to the point of introducing it, and we need to break down what the barriers are. There are opportunities there, and we have seen it. The Okehampton line in Devon is a good example of where we put in an improved bus service connecting with trains; for the bus that connects with it, patronage has gone up 65%. People want to do that and, if you can make the integrated ticketing work as well, you will get more people using it.

To make it user-focused, it is about understanding the system: the ticket prices, what restrictions there are, and what tickets you can use and when. If a train is not running, can you use a different train, between different operators and between modes, between rail and bus? Rail networks are helpful in the sense that the infrastructure is fixed. That makes it more understandable. What Transport for London has done well is use the rail model of maps for buses. People understand a bus route; where it goes to and from, if they see what looks like a rail map; outside of London, you almost never see a map at a bus stop, and somebody is thinking about whether they should get the bus into town, a taxi, walk or drive. If the network of public transport is understandable, they are more likely to use it. It is the same with connections over different areas. Once people make a journey and discover it is workable, they are more likely to repeat it. They are more likely to take a job in a place where they have a different opportunity to get to education or employment. We know this is why rural life expectancy is worse than in urban areas; transport is the difference. If people do not see a way to access and understand the information, they do not start to access it. Those online platforms need to work across boundaries and authorities. It needs to be a higher level than an individual highway authority or transport authority.

Just thinking about data specifically, so far we have had a mention of Google Maps, which is probably the most integrated we have at the moment, but I take your point that it does not have driving plus public transport; it is either/or. Are there data barriers at the moment to making these things better? Are we missing data? Is it not in the right format? What kind of barriers are there? I worry about the geography point, in that there are lots of different apps being developed all over the place. A question was asked of the Department for Transport, which very helpfully said that it did not maintain a complete list of all the apps that are under development. It seems quite likely that you could be using one app at your starting place, then you will presumably be using the Great British Railways app, and then you end up in a completely different town and you have to download another one. That does not feel like an ideal integrated and joined-up journey. What geography do you think these technological platforms should be trying to cover?

With the coming together of rail and buses under public control, the possibility of sharing data across those platforms is easier. Where we have issues, it is with things like the wider mobility system, so your e-scooters, e-bikes and car clubs. These are not public systems; they have their own GDPR requirements. They have their own profitability concerns. Integrating data across those services with the bus-rail system is going to remain quite challenging. In Seattle, the Government have said, “If you want to operate services on the public highway, these are the requirements, and you have to share this type of data with us.” Public authorities do not need to have access to all that data, but for planning purposes it would be great to know roughly where the origins and destinations are, so that we can start seeing where there are other opportunities to join things up. We can write those into contracts. It is the public highway that these systems are using, so I would focus on that.

We should not all be developing our own. Whether there is a tendency to do it, we should be trying to use the national platforms that are already available. In the south-west, we invest heavily in Traveline, which gives us rail information, and with the Bus Open Data Service. The information is out there, and people can develop things. It almost feels like we are making it more complicated than it needs to be. The opportunity and the technology are there to be able to do it.

People who are confident in using apps on phones and tablets in the home while planning and during a journey will be comfortable in doing that. Even for them, it is critical that things join up. It is around which modes, what time of day, how many people are travelling and so on. It might be a question of joining up things that exist rather than creating new things. A one-stop shop that takes you to where you are going to and from, how many people are travelling, and what time you are travelling is more helpful. It is the Google Maps analogy. That asks you when you are travelling and if you have a fixed departure or arrival time. Then you choose a stream; it does not join between the streams. We need to remember that not everybody can access devices. Ironically, people with disabilities sometimes have more access. I do not know if people saw Chris McCausland’s recent programme talking about the use of digital devices for transport. He uses data on devices more than many people I know who are sighted, because he does not have access to other things that we are using. So people plan in different ways. We should not have to have different platforms for different people in different situations. They need a one-stop shop, wherever they are in the country and whatever mode they are using. Joining up systems is going to be more relevant than trying to create new things.

Damien mentioned the Bus Open Data Service. There is a lot of data out there. It is free and accessible. It is very comprehensive but pretty hard to use, and I am speaking from my own experience. The data question is whether local transport authorities or other organisations have the capacity to use it. That may be something to think about in terms of how it is published and packaged. In terms of data volume, we are fine and in a good place. On the geography point, I would like to push back slightly. There is a position for different apps and systems for different levels of geography. It just requires a clear division of what services we are looking at, for instance, a GBR app or system for intercity rail. As soon as you get into Manchester, you will then have to go on to its local rail network. I do not think it would make sense to put all TfL services on a GBR app. The point is that there are different transport journeys that serve different functions. There are transport journeys to get you around cities, which will have lots of regular users, so having a system that focuses on the economic geography of that city, and which is consistent, has benefits. It is not that everything is locked away on an app. It can be their own ticketing systems, ticket offices, ticket machines or even just tap-on and tap-off. You do not have to worry about that stuff too much if you are reassured that you are not going to be charged through the nose because it is within a system. However, there is value in splitting that intercity journey on to a separate thing. That is not to say that we should proliferate it across everything, especially in our big cities, where you have these big integrated transport networks. There is scope to do something different there.

Good morning. I just wanted to pick up on Alex’s question about gaps in data and information, because the Committee has heard in other areas that there are important gaps between modes. For example, we know much more about rates of harassment on trains than we do on buses. So, thinking in two parts: any data collected at the moment that is not shared but may be useful, and then data that would be reasonable and practicable to obtain but is just not collected at all. Are there particular types of information, coming under one of those two categories, that you would like to name for us that you think would be useful for integration?

In terms of the two bits of the piece, it is about the nature of the issues. As you say, understanding the ways in which people are affected, we know that harassment or fearfulness in public places is a huge barrier to transport. We tend not to measure it. Caroline Criado Perez wrote “Invisible Women” nearly 10 years ago. She flagged a lot of sources of information but noted there are things we do not know. She noted that we know people are fearful around their own characteristics: age—younger and older—disability, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and so on. The intersectionality of those things is even more important if you are not just older, female or disabled but you are an older, female, disabled person. Knowing how that affects people’s transport decisions is a huge issue, and then recognising that in integrated transport is a separate thing. They are both things that we need.

Moving on to a general question, and there might be some follow-ups, depending on time and how we do. Before I ask you, I should let you know that there will be a separate question later about modal shift in respect of cars. What are the main benefits that integrated transport could deliver? Again, we are particularly interested in benefits that can be demonstrated, whether through quantification or through other means.

There are a number of benefits, but the benefits I can think of from the work environment that I am in are around cost. If you have an integrated transport network, it can reduce the cost of providing statutory services such as access to education or health. Obviously, there is a benefit for the users themselves in journey times. There is also a benefit in terms of reducing congestion and pollution. We see the impact when things go wrong every day, and it would free up so much time if the system worked to be able to further improve things. I do not know if that is the wider thing to say, but there is a lot of time spent picking up when things do not work, and we need to turn that around to concentrate on getting things better and then being able to improve things. We are reacting a lot of the time, rather than being proactive.

It gives us the opportunity to better link to wider objectives, such as employment sites, healthcare and particular social needs. We have known that is something we should be doing more, but it has just been very difficult to do anything about it within the system that we have had. Integration should open up opportunities for a lot of people who are not able to participate in those sorts of activities at the moment. That is going to be an earlier win than the mode shift that we will come to later.

I will talk about the economic benefits, and we have quantified this in the work we did looking at taking steps to integrate transport in England’s biggest cities outside London, specifically the city regions that have mayors who have greater transport powers and can do these things as it stands. That would mean taking the network that you have and making it better: increasing bus frequencies on underserved routes, better integration between bus and train, and speeding up journey times through road powers. We found that if you took those steps, you could get 1.2 million more people into these big city centres within a reasonable 30-minute journey. That is an additional impact on what we already have, which is about a third increase in connectivity for all these cities, bringing them much more in line with European standards in terms of connectivity to city centres. It means that, by increasing the effective size of labour markets, you are better matching workers to employers, potentially unlocking £17 billion in additional productivity benefits for the national economy. This is why the integrated transport question is most important in our big cities from an economic perspective.

Journey time is critical, but journey time reliability is also critical in thinking about benefits. We tend to skew the prediction of benefits, both in choosing what schemes we do and prioritising them, by car transport. As transport modellers, we could consider the journey time and the value of the journey time of pedestrians and cyclists, but in the main we do not because we are not required to. We can consider the mortality and morbidity benefits of active travel. We know that one in six deaths is caused primarily by inactivity, that it costs £8 billion-plus, yet we do not price the benefits of active travel in most schemes. We tend to segregate things by saying, “This thing is a congestion scheme,” “This thing is a public transport scheme” and “This thing’s a walking and cycling scheme,” but actually every transport intervention affects all aspects. If we took a bigger picture of what good looks like in the economic sense, we would take different decisions. So in pricing all the modes and people, we know that keeping people mobile in later life improves their life expectancy and the quality of their health. We know that older people are an immense part of an economy—they look after grandchildren. We know that one in five grandparents looks after grandchildren every week on multiple days, enabling people to work. The cost to the economy of that is largely ignored, but if those people cannot travel, whether it is being kept safely driving or access to other modes, that has an enormous aspect to the economy. CIHT is very keen to have that bigger picture of transport benefits and impact on people. If we priced everything, we would take completely different decisions about what we do and how we allocate money.

That point about walking and cycling modelling, and not taking into account journey time savings, is really interesting. Is that a factor in the DFT’s modelling?

It is. The changes to the “Green Book” changed how we forecast and monitor benefits. We tend to do more forecasting than monitoring, so if we do not monitor what happened, we make false assumptions about outcomes. We know that building road capacity has very short-term benefits, much shorter-term benefits than we tend to assume. Professor Metz at UCL has shown that we grossly overstate the duration of the benefits, which means we skew the balance of cost and benefits to schemes, so the things we choose are not the things that actually deliver the best return on investment.

I suppose the benefits you have described, and Mr Johnson in particular described, are wider economic benefits. Is there any evidence of direct economic benefits for transport users? We are thinking about the up-front cost, which is often required from investment in integrated transport. Is there any scope for price reductions to follow from greater efficiencies arising from integration, or good examples of the costs of fares, for example, being reduced as a result of integration?

I would say yes, potentially. Part of that is down to the fact that if you have an integrated system across different modes, you are going to increase connectivity, which is going to benefit your local economy, put more money in local people’s pockets and raise their standards of living. Fares are obviously a decision for the local transport authority, based on its assessment of how it wants to encourage use of transport relative to other modes. Also, if you bring all those modes under one system, you can do things such as cross-subsidisation, where if it were, for example, a deregulated offering, that might mean the focus would only be on the most profitable routes, leading to over-service on those routes, maybe at the expense of less profitable routes that are still important for the wider network. We see that in London: the more profitable arm of the system, the tube, cross-subsidises the buses, and there is more scope for that when you bring integration into these other urban areas.

We have heard about good examples of integration being done well, both in the UK and internationally. We have also heard evidence that bringing different modes together at one point in time and space is not enough. Are there any examples of integration projects being done badly that you would like to draw to our attention, and what are the main lessons to be learned from failure?

I will start with a concern I have about the approach to integration that we are taking with the decision to delay the tram in West Yorkshire. We have had five years of commitment at a high level, across different political parties, that West Yorkshire is too large an economy to be missing some form of integrated mass rapid transit. We have had five years of strategic planning to deliver that, and then it was put under review, which kicks it back another couple of years, meaning we are not going to see it until the late 2030s. In a sense, if we have agreement that there is a key strategic need, we cannot really call it integrated planning if we cannot get agreement about how we are going to deliver something in a significant economic area within the country. That is one example of us not joining up our decision-making, support-funding and devolution processes to support what everyone would agree is the kind of integrated outcome we are aiming for. Nobody has thrown the whole thing in the bin, but it is just an example of overcomplicating what appears to be a commitment.

It is not necessarily that things are done badly, but it is so difficult to achieve some things. There are examples in our organisation of trying to introduce bus priority, but there is such resistance to doing it that when it is introduced, it is watered down. You may have started off with a plan for a 24-hour bus lane, but it ends up being something that is just a couple of hours at peak times, which is then open for more abuse. The transport planners who are trying to introduce these things by going out to consultation and so on get a lot of abuse online, and in other forums, for trying to introduce these measures, which just makes it really difficult to get anything like that done.

The final question from me is the modal shift question. I am conscious of time, so please do not feel the need for everyone to come in on this question unless you feel compelled to do so. Would a focus on providing more joined-up journeys encourage modal shift and potentially reduce car use? If so, how, and how good is the evidence for that shift?

I will start with the reasons why it will. People find moving between different forms of transport much more painful than they do sitting on them. The cost to them of being at an interchange can be two-plus times the cost of being on the bus. So if you make that interchange feel safer, easier to move through and more reliable and trustworthy, there is evidence that it reduces the pain they feel, and they are more likely to make that journey. It will therefore be more competitive relative to a whole range of alternatives, including the car. It is not going to be transformational for everything, but that is one thing. The other thing to focus on is the long-distance opportunities to connect to rail. I talked earlier about the poor quality of bike-rail interchange. If you can get that right, you are taking long-distance car trips off the network, which is also a prize that other countries have done better with than we have.

On the international angle, it is sometimes claimed that people in Europe are more likely to be willing to make those interchanges than people in the UK. Does that have the ring of truth to you, and is it a result of better integration to start with, or are there wider factors at play?

My favourite example is Vienna, which had a €365 pass for the year that you could use on the rail, bus and metro, but it was also integrated with its land-use and parking-restraint policies. It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, and it sounds like a duck. My point is that you can point to these places that have put all these things together to show it works.

The answer is yes, up to a point. You can improve the network through integration that will encourage modal shift, but you have to have the stick with the carrot. Our modelling shows that if you increase connectivity in places such as Leeds and Sheffield, half of the people you better connect will still likely drive because they have access to a car and it is significantly quicker for them to drive. You have to have integration as a whole package across public transport and private transport, and recognise the trade-offs that if you want to encourage modal shift, you have to disincentivise car use as well. You have to be politically brave, as we have seen in London, to reduce congestion, which goes on to benefit your public transport further.

Just to be absolutely sure, when you say a stick, are you talking about measures like congestion charging and workplace parking levers?

Exactly, and ultra-low emissions.

I have a couple of follow-ups, which I will very quickly get out of the way. Kate, I was really interested in your point about walking and cycling not being valued in the same way. Something strange happens to us when we get in our car and we expect the whole transport system to be designed around us, but it seems that is exactly what the DFT thinks as well. Do other countries evaluate the benefits of walking and cycling? Is there something we can just lift and drop into the UK?

Yes, certainly in continental countries and increasingly in the US, all the impacts of transport are monetised, both in forecasting and choosing interventions, whether it is built infrastructure or the joined-upness of systems, and in measuring benefits. If we build cycle infrastructure but nobody uses it, we have an output but no outcome, but if we are not measuring, nobody knows whether we have an outcome. The system at the moment in the UK permits it but does not require it. We know what gets measured gets done. If you do not require it to be measured, it does not get done, which is why we see that disparity. It is the same in the wider aspect of safety in journeys. We know that most walking and cycling injuries do not get measured, which is a deterrent to travel, but we do not include it. Trips, slips and falls on footways are not included in road traffic collisions, so they are not measured.

That is something we talk about in Edinburgh. We could not really quantify all those trips and falls in our road safety strategy. Greg, you have talked about the proportion of multimodal and unimodal journeys a couple of times. You make unimodal sound like a bad thing. I walked here this morning. You are not going to force me to split my journey into multimodal, are you?

No. The statistics show that 7% of people use more than one significant mode on a journey.

What is that mode? I assume it is not walking from my front door down to the car on my drive.

There is a length of journey that you have to make for it to count as being multimodal. If you got out of your car and walked to the door of wherever you are going, that would not count as multimodal. The statistics show that most journeys where we move from one mode to another are walking to bus or train. It is important to understand that when we look at the integration statistics. What do we mean? Are we trying to make people be able to do more bus-rail? Or is it bus-bus? What are we integrating here? Most of the journeys we make at the moment are either walk-to-bus, walk-to-rail or, certainly in London, it might be tube-tube. Doing those two different journeys is much more difficult in somewhere such as Leeds or West Yorkshire. You are much less likely to have rail and then bus connectivity in the journey because there are just fewer of them.

What proportion of unimodal journeys is just walking? There is a vast number of trips every day that are just people walking.

It is the overwhelming majority of very short journeys. I would have to look up the exact statistics, but most journeys of under 1 mile are walked. It is the same for a substantial amount of 2-mile journeys, and then it tails off.

That gives me hope. In everything we do as a Committee, we come across accessibility as an issue. The Government hope that integrating transport is going to help with some of the issues that people with disabilities face when using public transport. Is integrated transport necessarily more accessible for people?

It can be, but at present it is not, and it varies around the country. The physical accessibility of buses and trains varies. It comes back to the point about reliability, confidence and information. You have to give advance information to the rail operator that you want to travel on a certain service if you need assistance, but if your train is delayed, there is no system for the person on that train to tell the operator of their next train that they are delayed and will need assistance. It is about the joined-upness of that integration. The little things have a huge impact, such as dropped curbs and accessible crossings to get to and from the start of the journey. That in many ways is the biggest accessibility for many people who are older and/or with disabilities, including people with small children, prams, pushchairs and so on. The modes of public transport are often accessible. Taxis are not always accessible, which means that if you are getting a rail journey, for example, and you need a taxi at the other end, will there be an accessible taxi available at the time you are arriving? All those things are deterrents, and if people have the choice of a private car, they are more likely to use it, even if they do not really want to.

I have had a few conversations about the accessibility of taxis, and so on; it has been an ongoing theme. Of course, people having to pre-book a train because they have a disability is not good either. What about ticketing? I am guessing that through-ticketing is good for accessibility, but I have had a visual impairment. Are there any apps available for me to book my ticket? I am guessing the answer is no.

From a bus point of view, contactless payment, which is the default mode of paying, is actually more accessible because everybody can use it. Pretty much everybody with any disability who is travelling will have access to a contactless bank card.

What about buying a single ticket for a joined-up journey?

In terms of buying a single ticket, it does not join up, which matters for trip chaining. In London, if you make a second bus journey within an hour of the first, the second is free. That is a huge benefit for accessibility. It actually disproportionately benefits women more than men, because women make more multi-trip chain journeys. But if you are limited from an accessibility point of view, you might have fewer choices. So the joined-upness is a problem, but it affects you even more disproportionately because some options that might have been available to other people are not available to you. As far as I am aware, there is no integrated system for combining your ride, shared ride, e-scooter, hire scooter with your bus ticket and rail ticket, or with different operators.

The objective is to get to that place, and making it accessible is a real challenge, is it not?

It gives people confidence. If they do not have confidence or certainty, they are less likely to do it.

In terms of transport planning and land use, how do you think it could be better integrated? How can transport be embedded as part of the planning process? Do you have any recommendations for doing that?

Most of the infrastructure we have is existing, so improving that is important, but within developments, the planning and integration is important. One of the concerns CIHT has is around large numbers of small developments, each individually not making a contribution to a joined-up sustainable system. If 100 developments each deliver 50 houses, each of those developments has a small impact on transport, but together they have a huge impact. We need that connectivity, and we obviously note the national planning policy framework and so on, which need to reflect the fact that even the smallest developments have an impact on transport. It needs to be sustainable, and we need to build developments that give people genuine choices about travel. At the moment, there is a presumption in favour of development, and that is tending to lead to ever more unsustainable transport. Planning authorities need to have that control, but it needs a bigger picture. As we get more authorities, those decisions must run across boundaries as well.

You are right to say that planning should be aligned with integrated transport. The key measure is aligning powers in the same geography because then, for instance in our city regions, transport planning can be done at the same time as spatial planning, house building, commercial space and so on. Again, we need to think about what transport does. It connects people to opportunities. How do you increase the reach of that? We have talked about making things better and bigger. Bringing people closer to the network is another way to increase the number of people within that catchment and you do that through spatial planning. For instance, if a mayor has transport powers at the same time as spatial planning powers—as we see in the London plan—then you can align those developments and get the most out of your transport network. Bringing more people within reach of public transport stops makes it more viable. You are also increasing the size of your labour market, giving people more opportunities to travel farther in a similar amount of time, and there are ways at the local level to focus development around transport stops, such as local development orders. In places such as Lille in France, it has really focused on the need for this level of density around transport stops. There is also scope to release greenbelt land around stations that are well connected to city centres, which preserves most of the greenbelt while increasing the number of people within the catchment by a lot.

We need to be a bit firmer with our development planning. Some developers are building good developments that really get this and integrate it, but there are a lot of rubbish, car-dependent developments being built that have no chance of enabling an integrated solution in the future because of the way the streets are designed. They are not going to be running bus services to it. I have an example near me where there is a car club, which is brilliant, but it is right on the edge of the development. There is no lighting around it; it is like an orphan car in the corner. The integrated national transport strategy has to address this, and we have to look at how we can develop models that enable us to build housing at pace while integrating this thinking into those housing decisions. It happens on the continent; it happens in Sweden. They put the investment in public transport first and build around that. Can we think of partnership models where we deliver that with the developers and take some of the land value uplift that comes back from it? There must be solutions to this that do not mean we are in a battle of wanting the integrated transport but not being able to sell the homes at those prices, so they are not built. We have to get beyond that debate, I feel.

A practical example of what we face is that transport competes with lots of other areas when a new development is being built, and it is quite often the case that it will be whether the developer should invest in a community hub or in transport. We see cases where transport goes through the CIL process. There is a lot of capital investment, but what transport requires, particularly for local buses, is revenue funding so that you can pump-prime services at the start while developments are taking shape. Then in time, if it is a deregulated network, it becomes commercially viable, or if it is franchised, it costs less to run that service. Quite often, we are not getting the funding through to be able to put those transport options in place at the start of the process, which makes a difference to how people travel.

Sticking up a bus shelter can be a lot quicker than trying to develop an integrated transport hub, which tends to be the reason we go for that option. It is quite interesting when you are looking at an integrated solution, the amount of work that goes into developing the rail element of that versus the amount that goes into, “Oh, we will just put a bus shelter there, and we might get real-time if we are lucky.” We need to level it up quite a bit so that they are looked at on equal terms because the bus is often looked at as secondary once you have had to go through this massive process of building the station. Then you need the revenue funding to be able to put the service on to integrate with the network and the rail.

We do not think about it enough in those terms with buses. It is given much more thought in terms of modes and where you can develop those hubs. But as was said earlier, it has to be a hub where people feel confident to wait if something has happened, or where they can get reliable information. Developing a hub in a rural area is important because if the connection fails, no one wants to be left in that area. We plan our education transport networks around hubs where the young people can be taken by minibus or taxi to a particular point, then wait for the main coach or the local bus to arrive, but someone stays with them to reassure them that they are not going to be left abandoned. So it is all about confidence as well, and where people can get access to information if something goes wrong.

It is easier, cheaper and quicker to deliver bus rather than rail infrastructure, but it has to meet the user’s needs. It has to have seating for resting and a physical shelter. Standing in the rain at a bus stop for an infrequent service that might not be running to time is a very strong deterrent. That joined-upness is needed. For reasons I do not really understand, we are seeing more areas rolling back from things like park and ride, which is the joined-upness of being able to drive to a park and ride a bus, rather than driving into the town centre. It is about sustainability: air quality and traffic-free town centres, but park and rides seem to be closing in some towns rather than expanding as you would expect. But it does have to meet the user’s needs. It is about physical comfort, information and the reliability and frequency of services to make it work.

Before we move on, I want to reflect on what Kate and Damien have just said. The elephant in the room seems to be the commercial viability of a lot of this, which is obviously based around the local government settlement and section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act. I suppose what we have is existing communities where we might want to improve what is there, which is one funding requirement, but then you also have the different funding streams for a new build system, the section 106 requirement and having to prove the need. We only have one question on this, so if you have any further thoughts, it would be useful to send them into the Committee, because how the funding is allocated feels like a big elephant in the room. The Bus Services Bill and the Railways Bill are giving all these local authorities more powers, but they are not necessarily giving them the money, or they will have to choose which bits they fund. My local authority has taken away bus shelters, for example, and is struggling to keep services viable. Try defending that when you were on the Committee that was told to look at them all individually, one by one, and sign them all off. I managed to avoid too much political embarrassment. I am going to move on to the next question, because discussing the integrated national transport strategy this morning is really important; it is ultimately what we are here to impact. Once we have talked about that, colleagues, we will finish off, and if there are any further questions people want to ask, there will be an opportunity to do so, if we have time.

The question is simple but the answers probably will not be. What would you most like to see in the upcoming integrated national transport strategy to support more joined-up journeys? We are eagerly awaiting it in the near future. We have been awaiting it in the near future for some time, but maybe it will come.

I have had a look at this before, and we need it to set out how we have an integrated, co-ordinated function at an LTA level that covers access to all services; it is not just about the infrastructure but how we plan services and functions within the public sector that can allow for that integration to take place.

I would like to see clarity on how the interface between the rail system and the mayoral combined authorities and other local bodies is going to be managed in terms of who is actually going to have the say, and on what, in terms of integration, such as holding trains for connections with buses and so on. The detail of this really matters. Everyone can write a nice statement about how important integration is, but what does it really look like? I mentioned the importance of thinking beyond just bus-rail or bus-rail-bike, in particular making sure we think about car sharing, taxis and so on; it is important that National Highways is part of this conversation. We cannot have an integrated national transport strategy and then have a separate motorway management company. The planning discussion we have is really critical, but we have to design with people. We have been very focused on our own individual modes. The rail network understands what goes on in rail; the bus operators focus on buses. We need to listen to people at this point and design the solutions that are going to work with them. We really need to get some funding for participation and make sure we get the design of it right early on.

The high-level framework of how it approaches integration is really important. There is a risk that it just tries to do everything, and the most important thing to come out of its thinking is a sense that integration means different things at different levels of geography, which will require some focus on what we mean by integration in our big cities, smaller urban areas and in a national sense. It will need some sense of priority and a recognition that if you want to meet the Government’s economic mission and deliver the largest economic benefits, a big part of that integration focus will have to be on what happens in our big cities and connecting them up better. That sense of place is really key and it needs to come out.

We see the current problem being a lack of vision and joined-upness in planning and operating, which means you get isolation from the users, and we talked about things not being used since. We had the road safety strategy a couple of weeks ago, which was an enormous step forward in road safety. It is a big part of integrating transport around safety. It shows what is possible when being ambitious in setting a vision of what good looks like, and that then takes you to what we would like to see from a vision that combines modal shift, which makes journeys work and be more sustainable from a net zero perspective. Resilience and connectivity actually serve users and get used, which speaks to your point that it is not efficient. If you do not have good usage, it is not efficient, so it is not economic and is not supported. That is safer, cleaner and more inclusive, and the vision needs to focus on that as well, which gives customers choice and experience. At the moment, people do not have choices because things are not integrated. If those four elements together form a vision in the same way the road safety strategy has given a vision of a safe system, and what the individual bits of that mean, that has a real potential for change.

This is not the first time that central Government have talked about wanting to encourage and co-ordinate better transport integration. There is a wonderful quote when Barbara Castle was appointed Transport Minister in 1965, and Harold Wilson said to her, “Your job is to produce the integrated transport policy we promised in our manifesto. I could work something out myself, given half an hour.” All these years later, if that had been achieved, we probably would not be having this hearing today. As the Government produce their own integrated transport strategy, are there lessons that can be learned from previous Government attempts to encourage greater integration?

The observation is probably that now is the right time to be doing this. If you look back to 1998, they were trying to develop an integrated transport strategy with a thoroughly unintegrated set of transport modes, each with its own set of interests. We are doing this at a point in time when those things are being brought together, at least in some places across the country, so this really is the time to seize on that and say to Active Travel England and to National Highways, “Let’s pull all this together and make it work.” It is a timely opportunity.

Since that last strategy attempt, the landscape of political power has changed, and it is recognising that we have greater local powers in our big cities, which have improved transport a lot in these places without a strict national strategy. It is recognising that as a reality and allowing them to continue doing the good work that is being done in those places. What can a national strategy do to support further improvements in that and provide the powers to get fully integrated networks in its city regions?

I know it is a document we are all eagerly anticipating. Moving on to the way we measure transport benefits, some of which has been touched on in earlier evidence, what metrics should be used to evaluate transport integration and its impacts? I would like to start with Ms Carpenter. We would be particularly interested in panellists’ views on the recent changes to the “Green Book” and whether you think those changes will achieve its stated aims.

If we measured all the impacts of transport, we would take different decisions. At the moment, it is only journey times; pretty much everything is dominated by journey times. If we included journey times, reliability, comfort, safety, convenience and accessibility of public transport infrastructure, so experience metrics combined with numerically quantified metrics. The health metrics are probably, in many ways, the biggest financial lever, but we tend to disaggregate health from an expenditure point of view. We also know that social care accounts for more than half of local authorities’ budgets. Transport is one of the biggest things for reducing that, but we separate it. We know the World Health Organisation has all the tools for quantifying the health outcomes of transport interventions, but we largely do not use them on a daily basis in planning and delivering transport.

In purely economic terms, the few indicators that are looked at need to tell you about accessibility and connectivity to centres of employment found in big city centres, and other centres of employment in those places. Put simply, how many people can reach these areas within a certain time, which gives you the effective size of your labour market and, therefore, the potential of that place. It is not just that someone could technically reach the place in that time. It is can they easily do it? Is there a frequent service? Can they swap modes, and so on? You can use open data to do these things. Another simple metric to keep an eye on, and to demonstrate whether integrated transport is successful in cities, is public transport ridership. We know that UK cities lag behind European counterparts. If you think about public transport being the most efficient way to get around dense urban areas, that is a key indicator. Within that, looking at trends in bus ridership, we know that the only place in the UK that has seen increasing bus ridership since 1990 is London; it has declined everywhere else. Do we start to see a reversal in the trend of bus ridership in the rest of the UK?

I do not think there is a shortage of measures in the Department for Transport’s calculation of the potential benefits. The problem is that we do not measure and capture those things in real life, as Kate said. Different modes have captured these things in different ways. Reliability means something different on the rail network than on the bus network. This is not going to be straightforward. It might be good to have some technical harmonisation, but I do not think that is actually what will tell us whether this is working. We need to capture the experience of users, and understand what this does to the diversity of users of the network. We have not been very good at doing that across modes, and we do not really understand whether our interventions work. We have to focus on capturing that data, which means investing in monitoring and evaluation, so I would suggest some bigger trials, like the Bus Centre of Excellence. Let us focus and really try to gather some evidence in the early period of the plan and then roll it out to other places so that everyone does not have to repeat this exercise.

On bigger trials, what would an appropriate geography be for such an experiment in buses, in your view?

Damien might have a different view from me, focusing more on the rural areas, but West Yorkshire does not totally define itself by the combined authority boundary, because you have all the York stuff coming in. I would say that you could probably do quite a lot by focusing on a combined authority kind of geography. That is how they would largely develop.

You could do something on a combined authority level and a county level potentially, maybe looking at one of the areas that is going into a new combined authority, such as Devon or Lancashire. Just moving on, we capture a lot, particularly on the buses, about what people think about it and when they are using it, but we are not very good at capturing why people do not use it. We need more data about why people do not feel confident using the bus, what would actually make them change their mode, and how integration could help with that, rather than just focusing on those who are already in the system.

That point has come up in previous evidence sessions. Something we have been told in written evidence is that standard appraisal methods do not always serve particular areas very well, such as areas with unusual geographies or rural areas. For example, unusual geographies might include Cornwall or Cumbria. Do you think there is a case for moving to place-based business cases for the appraisal and evaluation of transport programmes, and do you think there are some areas of the country that are disadvantaged by traditional business case and appraisal methods, and that lose out on investment as a result?

A lot of this comes down to the mindset of how we allocate funding. If you look at the five-stage business case, strategic case, and so on, and believe that the strategic case is really important in defining what we invest in, then your benefit-cost ratio is about determining what the best way of achieving that particular outcome is. We should accept that those outcomes are going to look different in different parts of the country. Where this falls down is when we want to have some kind of ranked list that advises that we should really only invest in the top ones. That capital allocation is very different from thinking about the strategic needs in different parts of the country, and there is a tendency to get confused between the technical tool and its application in supporting good decision making. We can do a lot of this if we accept that transport in Cornwall is actually an important strategic outcome, and we will look at what it will cost us to do that.

I wonder if I might invite Mr Jones to comment on this question as well, bearing in mind that your members will include these areas.

Could you just repeat the question, please?

Basically, it is about whether there is a case for moving from a single national approach to a more place-based approach to appraisal and business cases. The question comes about from evidence we have had from Cornwall Council and other areas that argue they may be disadvantaged by the current standard approach.

It is really important. I remember having debates with Government Departments about the impact of an estuary, and you could be looking at transport investment in a geographical area, but having a big piece of water in the way means people have to go round it—you have to look at it in a very different way. It is better to be much more local in thinking about the geography of a given area, compared with an urban area, where it is very different and you do not have those same barriers.

This one is specifically for Greg. In your evidence, you talked about the need for a “single point of truth” for a transport network. What did you mean by that?

Who do you go to when things go wrong? Who is responsible for that journey? I will give you an example. I booked a car club connected to a train journey. Obviously, I booked it through two different providers. The train was late, and the car club ended up being cancelled as a result. No one was in charge of helping me to resolve that. If we want an integrated system, there has to be some responsibility for connected journeys. Maybe it is different at different scales, but if we want to market those products to people, it comes with an accountability consequence. We talked about accountability earlier. Who is in charge of that? Otherwise, it is just offerings on a card that you can pay for. That is one form of integration, but it is not all.

Is there a role for Government in doing that? Who should be responsible?

In London, you would say TfL is pretty much seen to have de facto responsibility. The way it is going with the Bee Network in Greater Manchester, there is an identity, and with that identity comes accountability: “You are now on the Bee Network, and you are using this.” That is the kind of thing I would be looking for.

Is there possibly a role for passenger transport executives right across the country?

Yes.

I will just go around the room and give everyone a chance to ask a final question.

Thank you. This has been a really interesting discussion for me, because with integrated transport I have been guilty of thinking about how we do it, but not necessarily why we do it. Of course, that is really important, is it not? Lots of towns and cities in the UK are congested, so is it the aim of integrated transport to reduce non-essential car trips and get people on to other modes of transport to reduce that congestion, or is it about making journeys happen that are not happening just now? We were talking about people with disabilities earlier, but there might be other journeys that will happen if people are better connected. Is it some other reason, or is it everything?

It will vary from place to place. If you are looking at joining up journeys in a rural area, possibly not focusing on congestion reduction, access to key services and so on—

I am a city MP.

Yes, okay. For some, mode shifts will be a really important feature. If we are going to be on track with our climate targets, mode shift has to be one of the goals that sits behind this, but it will look different in different places.

I would agree with that: it is about getting people from A to B by any means. In smaller places that might be car travel; in bigger cities, using public transport might be more efficient. There is also the inclusion aspect: we know that a third of people in our most deprived neighbourhoods do not have access to private transport, and it is much higher in our cities, so it is also about giving people the opportunities to access what they need: education opportunities, that kind of thing.

We have had many decades of a predict-and-provide approach of trying to build our way out of a crisis. I was told on my first day in highways in 1988, “You can’t build your way out of a crisis.” I think we are still trying a bit. You cannot build the road capacity: if everybody could drive everywhere and wanted to drive everywhere, you could not do that anyway. But it is more about giving people choices. There is a perception that everyone wants to drive everywhere, and they do not. They want good choices; they want reliable choices. It is about choices, it is about sustainability—even the lowest emission vehicle is still a vehicle—and it is about accessibility and reducing the disparity of access to transport, which is a really big issue at the moment.

The point about choices, of course, is incredibly important. When we think about our cities, there are going to be winners if we get this right, but we have to accept that we cannot deliver all those benefits without maybe some people losing out. That is where the modal shift comes in, is it not?

Yes. If each mode works well, and the integration between them works well, including the ticketing, the pricing and the physical logistics, it reduces disparity rather than increasing it. What we tend to do is give ever more benefit to the people who already had more opportunities and choices.

It is a co-ordination problem in cities. You have to achieve some sort of modal shift in order to get everyone around faster and more efficiently. Actually, if you do that, if you encourage modal shift, you make things better for road users and those who have to use it: freight, and people who cannot use public transport.

Of course, I was being a coward by talking about non-essential car journeys, because everybody thinks their car journey is essential and it is all the other drivers who are doing non-essential journeys. Damien, sorry.

I was just coming back to one of the points Robert made about there being a lot of people who cannot access transport, and that has a big impact on their lives. We particularly see it when talking to colleagues in social care and the NHS; they are incurring significant costs in delivering care and services because we do not have transport for those people. We have cases where young people have been able to access public transport and integrated networks through training, and we are saving a significant amount of money for the councils by looking at it in a different way and making sure those young people can travel sustainably, which improves their life skills and all sorts of things. So it is a massive opportunity.

Yes, it is a bit more than just transport. Our residents expect us to have these conversations, and not just think about transport.

You have mentioned some examples of international best practice and where it has been done well. Are there any other examples that you wish to bring to our attention?

I suppose I would add Switzerland as a way of simplifying the rail network and the connectivity that spins off it.

Dijon is obviously cited in the integrated national transport strategy, and it goes to show that having unified power over every aspect of your local transport network pays real dividends in terms of modal shift and connectivity. I would just say that Dijon is not particularly special: it is everywhere across France, especially at city level and in local areas. One big part of that is the fact that lots of these systems can partially self-fund by raising local taxes—a top-up on payroll tax to go back into the transport system—and it makes a real difference.

Yes, some good examples on both the built environment side and the organisational side: the metropolitan region of Rotterdam and The Hague introduced a policy on chain mobility. I mentioned earlier that it disproportionately benefits some people who are most excluded at the moment. Cycling-public transport integration, 84 regional hubs, creating a seamless transport experience. New Zealand is an example of digital integration: joining up plans so that you get integrated national ticketing, which makes journeys more seamless for users. The Swiss model combines all modes, rail timetables, buses, other public transport in sort of clock-face services: they arrive at the same minutes past each hour, which gives a lot of confidence in when they are going to arrive, provided they arrive on time. Then some examples in the UK: the Eden Project in Cornwall and the National Trust Greenway House Dartmouth in Devon are good examples of effective integration of that transport.

I agree with that. Back to the national transport strategy, it has to have a good sense of place. Particularly at a national level, you are thinking about different things and what your transport network is doing, whether that be motorways or intercity train travel. Then when you get to your local places, particularly your city economies, transport is playing a very different role. It is connecting local people to different places. Starting from that and working out the details afterwards would be a really good way to start.

I would question whether the Department for Transport is going to be willing to hand over more freedom and control to local areas. If this is in fact about understanding more about what people do in their communities, you have to cut the strings a little of the modal silos in which we have been working and regulating. What is going to change in its practices to enable that? There is that balance of oversight, accountability and freedom. Again, these things need to be part of the discussion on the strategy, so great question.

Yes, I would endorse that. There is a distinction between what is seen and what is done. At the moment, customers see lots of different individual train operators, and that is confusing and undermines them. It does not matter whether there are different operators and different modes of transport; what matters is the user experience. If the way we present the information, the accessibility of information and so on, works for them, it does not really matter how it is organised. We have made things more disparate over the years, such as with different bus deregulation. You can see what is happening in Manchester. It is bringing things back under control, and that is delivering better clarity for the customer. That experience is improving because it both works more effectively and can be seen more effectively, and those things work together. If people do not understand it, it does not really matter whether it works in theory. It should be based on the user, just the same as a hospital should be based on the patient, but it is too often based on the specialties rather than the patient.

We particularly concentrate on modes, and because of the way funding works, you go for where you think you will get the funding to develop a service or an infrastructure, rather than what is the best mode. As an example, someone mentioned coaches earlier. There are no funding streams to develop a network of coach services, as there are for rail or bus, so they tend to be if something is commercially viable. But the opportunity in a large area, particularly a rural area, is massive. If you sample the south-west’s Falcon service, it is an example of where we are developing park and ride connections with it and all sorts of stuff, but it is coming on the back of little investment. If you had the investment, you could improve it so much more.

One of my staff members goes to work in Plymouth on the Falcon from Exeter, so it just goes to show that you have to use a bus that is aimed at an airport to get between the two biggest cities in the area. Do we have any further questions from anybody else? No, in which case I will ask about two things. We have obviously looked at the Bus Services Bill and the Railways Bill in this Committee, and devolution comes up a lot: the different mayoralties, which Jacob touched on, versus areas that do not have one yet. Unless the integrated national transport strategy really takes it by the horns, do you think we are in danger of creating a two-tier system with all these strategies and Bills where you have the bits that get to have strategic mayoral authorities and everywhere else? Therefore, would a recommendation be that we need to push the Government to make sure they are actually factoring in rural areas with the integrated transport strategy, particularly those areas that are going to be later adopters? That is a bit of a leading question. Secondly, what single Government policy or intervention do you think would be most effective in facilitating transport integration and delivering more joined-up journeys for transport users? What would be your one wish that you would want to see in the strategy?

It would be really important to get them to spell out how this is going to work institutionally in the different settings. If this is an integrated national transport strategy, we have to be clear about how it works in these different areas now, even if they are going to transition later. The instructions to GBR about how it interfaces with these different things is just one example of how to do that. In terms of my single wish, I would like to see us go for a kind of at-scale mobility hub trial, which involves investing in our suburban areas and really focusing on creating the look, feel and experience of a safe and joined-up network.

From working in an area going through that process of change, we want to make sure that we do not lose the benefits we have achieved in integrating transport. There is a fear in the membership of ATCO that if the decisions are not made in the right way, we will lose the opportunity to integrate. There are solutions to be able to do it; through ATCO, I have talked to colleagues in Scotland about how it works in Strathclyde and all sorts of things. Sometimes there is an opportunity to look at the potential between devolved regions of the UK. In terms of a single Government policy, I deal with lots of Government Departments and what would be really good is to join them up to think about integrated transport, so you get better access to health, education and employment opportunities, rather than it being a single discussion with each. That would be my dream.

The devolution point is really important. Obviously, we are getting local government reorganisation, and with that there is more scope for greater local transport powers. I am less concerned about the two-tier thing, just because, having given greater powers to our city regions, it is the right way to do it. These are places with the capacity to make the changes. They are there to demonstrate the powers and the benefits of local transport, and it allows other places to follow their lead and take steps in their local areas while recognising that some areas may not need as many local powers as places with such a large economy. It seems to be the right way of doing it. Obviously, when that big reorganisation happens in practice, the delivery will be important. My one wish would be a commitment to rail devolution, particularly from GBR, which we know is still working out how it is going to run the railway network and what it is going to do, and it has this partnership working with mayors and combined authorities. What we have not seen yet is a commitment to say, “We aim to build local capacity in these places, and the end goal is to let mayors and city regions have local control over their rail networks.” For most places, including London, this is the missing piece of the puzzle for a fully integrated system. If you care about the local and national economic performance of these places, powers over things that are plugged into the local economy should be at that local level. Rail devolution within GBR is my one wish.

In terms of two-tier, yes, absolutely; it is a problem now and potentially a problem that will get worse. As I mentioned, the disparity in life expectancy and access to transport are integrally linked, and they tend to be worst in places that are not in those city regions. It is critical that we keep everybody moving forward. It is about making sure we are creating metrics and measurements to deliver that. My one wish would be that the system is oriented to users and that they are engaged. There is an expression used in stakeholder engagement: nothing about us without us. We tend to focus on telling people what is good for them rather than asking them what they want, but we need to remember that sometimes their perception might be, “Well, I cannot do this because it is too difficult.” The biggest benefit in transport comes from a very small amount of physical activity. A walk to a bus stop is a disproportionately beneficial physical activity, and an enormous proportion of the public take no physical activity at present; the cost to the country in health and social care is immense, and that is the prize. The prize is health. It is also sustainability, air quality, carbon emissions and so on, but health is the biggest cost to the public, including financially.

Thanks, everyone. That concludes today’s session. Thank you so much for your evidence. I feel it has been a very rich morning, and we could have gone on to so many other topics, so thank you for what you have been able to share with us. Please feel free to write to us with anything you feel you have not been able to cover in your answers this morning, and we will look forward to having our next oral session of this inquiry towards the end of February.