London calling
Despite overall levels of commuting continuing to fall, increasing numbers of rail passengers are making the daily commute into the capital. PAUL CLIFTON analyses the shifting travel patterns and economic forces at play
How can the railway cope with increasing numbers of rail passengers making the daily commute into the capital?
Long-distance commuting is the only way that jobs growth can be fed under current national planning policy. John Preston, Professor of Rail Transport, University of Southampton
It’s all about London. Booming employment, combined with a shortage of affordable housing in the capital, is changing the map of Britain’s travel patterns.
And the implications for the rail industry are huge. London is sucking in unprecedented levels of people and investment - from the Home Counties and well beyond.
As anyone on the 0717 from Basingstoke will tell you, there’s enormous pressure on the railway. Hundreds of people pour onto Platform 3 from a car park that’s already full, well before most people in the town have finished breakfast. They squeeze onto a crowded six-car train and disappear northwards. Many will stand throughout the entire 45-minute journey into Waterloo. Behind them, the platform empties and then almost immediately fills again.
Over the past 20 years the number of people commuting into London by train has more than doubled, and the fastest growth has been experienced in the past few years. This is despite the cost of a season ticket rising by 24% in real terms since 1995 - three times faster than the growth in average pay.
But hang on! Over the past two decades, the rate of car traffic growth has slowed. Average mileage per person has been falling since the early 2000s. You might struggle to believe that as you crawl round the M25 motorway past Heathrow, the busiest stretch of road in Europe, but that’s because the impact is masked by the steady increase in the UK’s population, which has been skewed heavily towards the South East. Two-thirds of all commuting to work is done by car, and it’s down by 18% over just one decade.
Bear with a few more facts and figures. It’s worth understanding just how far out of sync rail growth has become with the changes in our society as a whole. The latest national travel statistics show that the number of car trips by men in particular has fallen by a quarter. The number of 17 to 20-year-olds taking the driving test is down by a third. Overall, we are making fewer journeys than before.
The Government’s census analysis, published three years ago, includes this headline: “The decline of the regular commute.” In 2001, 86% of people with jobs made a daily commute. A decade later it had fallen to 81%, and the trend is continuing.
Yet for journeys into London’s booming jobs market, the opposite is true. Almost a million people commute into Westminster and the City each day. Electrification of the Great Western Main Line… the forthcoming upgrade to Waterloo station… Crossrail 1 and 2… arguably ( but rather more controversially) HS2… these are all about feeding the capital city’s voracious appetite for more workers.
So too is the upgrading of 12 miles of the M3 to become a ‘smart motorway’, with the hard shoulder being converted into a fourth driving lane. That will be followed by 32 miles of the M4 from Reading into west London. Together they cost more than £ 2 billion. The work by Highways England is comparable in scale to the electrification of the railway.
“This is all because of the jobs growth in central London, coupled with the lack of growth in housing provision,” explains John Preston, Professor of Rail Transport at the University of Southampton.
“Long-distance commuting is the only way that jobs growth can be fed under current national planning policy.
“It’s potentially sucking economic activity out of other centres - cities such as Southampton and Portsmouth. About the same number of people commute out of Southampton each day as travel into it for work - yet it is the major employment centre on the south coast.
“And there’s a case for trying to rebalance that, because the current trend may not be sustainable. In particular, the housing market may not be able to sustain the growth in jobs, and the transport system may not be able to move the commuting volumes that will be required to feed London’s growth.”
Preston explains that the big growth in employment is in finance, media and technology, all of which benefit from
agglomeration (workers and workplaces being close together).
The biggest agglomeration of employment by far is central London. He says that a similar pattern can be measured in Manchester, although on a smaller scale. Towns such as Bolton and Oldham are increasingly used by commuters, as house prices are lower than those closer to work.
“In London the growth in rail transport is focused almost entirely on the centre, with a smaller hub to the west at Heathrow,” he adds.
Tim Hill used to live in Wandsworth. He moved to the country for a bigger house and a better life. He now travels to work from Overton station, on the line between Basingstoke and Andover.
“I don’t think that I was prepared for how dramatic the change was,” he says. “Initially I saw my life getting a lot harder. Getting used to commuting was about making choices. Did I want to work on the train, or just relax and read a book? And was I going to get a seat?”
Hill admits the first six months were stressful. Then it became routine.
“There’s been a significant increase - I’d say around 50% - in passenger numbers over the nine years I’ve been travelling from Overton. There always used to be that ‘witching time’, that cut-off point of an hour out of London, after which commuting becomes difficult to cope with. Actually I’m just under an hour. When that becomes an hour and a half because the train is delayed, it has a marked change on you. By the time you get home, you’ve had enough.”
Hill reckons Overton is the last station on the line where it’s still possible always to get a seat. From Basingstoke onwards, people boarding the train have to stand for 45 minutes or more.
“That’s pretty brutal,” he adds. “I wouldn’t do that.”
Hill exemplifies the new breed of commuter, those seen to be changing the pattern of travel. The London jobs market is evolving, with a rapidly increasing number of people working the way he does.
“I’m employed by a company that believes work is a thing you do, not a place you go to. So I can choose where I get the best work done. For me that’s often London but sometimes it’s at home, while for others it’s in our Reading headquarters.
Newsreel footage in the aftermath of the Second World War reveals a very different world. “Britain now has 15 new towns,” announced Pathé in 1952. Eventually the number rose much higher. The Duke of Edinburgh was shown visiting a rubber glove factory in Harlow. Then he visited a new pub in Stevenage, run by a former England footballer. And he saw Milton Keynes, then little more than a farming community with just 160 homes.
London overspill, as it was then called, featured hundreds of thousands of people moving out to places such as Crawley, Basildon and Bracknell, while many existing towns and cities such as Peterborough, Basingstoke and Andover also greatly expanded. Manchester got Wythenshawe, Glasgow built Easterhouse, and County Durham gained Newton Aycliffe. And when the people moved, the jobs moved with them. Housing estates and factories were segregated to improve quality of life, but they were constructed no further than a bus ride apart.
Today the ethos has changed. Every morning the stations of many of these towns are packed with commuters heading back into the cities, because that’s where the best-paid jobs are to be found.
Teleworking was heralded as a cultural transformation that would reverse the trend - people could work from home.
“The teleworking evangelists thought we
would all be working from home all of the time, and that commuting would disappear,” says Preston.
“The reality is that most people who telework do so part-time, for one or two days, with the rest of the working week spent at the workplace. So what’s happened now is that the workplace can be further away from home. You get a greater separation of home and workplace. That’s fuelling the growth in long-distance commuting, in the South East in particular.”
The result is the rise of the ‘super commuter’. Around 4,000 people a day leave the Isle of Wight and get the ferry to work. There are people who travel to London daily from Devon and Cheshire. And Jonathan Davey, a student at the University of London, made the headlines last autumn. He found it was cheaper to rent a flat in the Polish city of Gdansk and commute 1,000 miles to lectures on EasyJet (returning to Poland for the weekends), than it was to live within walking distance of the university.
Clearly this trend cannot continue indefinitely. There is little spare urban land on which to create further infrastructure.
“There are limited possibilities for eliminating flat junctions by installing flyovers at Woking, Basingstoke and elsewhere,” explains Preston.
“It’s very expensive and disruptive to do that. There will be improvements in signalling technology. Capacity will increase a bit, but there are limits. And those limits will eventually be exceeded by the latent demand for long-distance commuting if this trend continues.”
Belinda Aspinall runs a website called Life After London. It has 5,500 members and helps people who are moving out to the country.
“When we started, we expected people to be looking at a very commutable distance,” she says. “People are now looking at longer distances. They’re not planning on working in London five days a week - they’re looking at working from home a bit and being flexible with their hours. As a result, they are able to go that much further in their day. It’s no longer about getting home in an hour. Some will stretch to two hours, because they are not doing it every day.”
Aspinall points out that the rising cost of property in the capital also has considerable bearing on this trend.
“We are a nation of homeowners, and for a lot of people this is to do with their inability to purchase a property in London. Most people are striving towards having their own home, and for many it’s out of reach in the capital. They are moving because a mortgage and a season ticket comes to less than the rent they would be paying in London.”
Approximately 90% of all office developments in London this century are within 500 metres of a station, and a quarter of the UK population lives in London and the South East. The Government is investing heavily in transport because of the effect that has on the whole economy.
Despite the talk of devolution, of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’, and of the ‘regional agenda’, Preston says the investment is geared more around feeding London than boosting the surrounding counties. However, London’s boom has unforeseen social consequences - the effect of separating work and home can be felt at the local shops and at the school gates.
“It means people are spending a lot of time away from the area in which they live,” says Preston. “Their daytime spend is elsewhere. That will have an effect on the night time population, turning what were once vibrant locations into dormitory suburbs.”
He adds: “This is the problem we have with infrastructure policy. Look at Network Rail’s Wessex Route Study, which considers investment options. It’s mainly focused on trying to pump ever more commuters into central London. It does not try to look at improvements to local services in order to make places like central Southampton and Portsmouth more attractive as business locations. Clearly this trend cannot continue.”
Yet for a rapidly increasing number of people, the social impact of a life on the move is clearly a price worth paying.
Most people are striving towards having their own home, and for many it’s out of reach in the capital. They are moving because a mortgage and a season ticket comes to less than the rent they would be paying in London. Belinda Aspinall, Life After London website