Little of substance in the Budget

Normally, I would have written my main article about the Budget, but we do not live in normal times. Indeed, this will not be the last time that the Coronavirus dominates this column.

The Budget was presented as both a path out of austerity and a response to the Coronavirus, when in fact it was neither. And the transport aspects are deeply disappointing both for the railways and for transport in general.

It is one of the tasks of my work as a columnist to interpret documents and reports put out by the Government and other agencies. I am used to the dissembling and the misuse of statistics which such documents invariably contain, but I am shocked at how little of substance there is in this document.

Let me start by saying a few nice words about Chancellor Rishi Sunak. The poor chap had less than a month to prepare the Budget, and clearly he shifted the emphasis away from austerity to spend, spend, spend. Moreover, he came across really well both at the despatch box and in subsequent interviews. If he manages to stay in the job for a couple of years and there is no crisis (big ifs), he must be a key contender to be the next leader of the Conservative party.

However, the increase in spending is actually not that impressive. The amount of extra money is relatively small - approximately an additional £30 billion each year, which represents around 3%. But as that is in cash terms, the real increase will depend on the level of inflation, although even this relatively modest increase does show that the Tories have abandoned their emphasis on reducing the deficit.

So far, OK, but then trying to decipher anything intelligible about transport is an uphill task. In the summary press release, the section on infrastructure says that over the next five years the Government will invest £640bn (or as the release says, more than half a trillion, which is £500,000,000,000).

Very little of this is actually new money - it is merely adding up a lot of existing commitments, some of which is maintenance rather than investment. And none of the additional money seems to be going to the railways, except perhaps the trivial amount of £500 million for ‘reversing Beeching’.

The Chancellor made great fuss about £27bn for the roads, but this is over five years and again was merely repeating past pledges. Worse, though, it confirmed several very expensive and unnecessary road schemes such as the Stonehenge tunnel, which are precisely the sort of projects that should be scrapped in this age of concerns about climate change.

Most oddly, there was no mention in the entire 125-page Budget report of HS2, by far the most expensive single commitment. That seems an incredible omission if, as the Government has now stated, it is a definitive commitment. Nor is Heathrow mentioned, which suggests a lack of commitment to reviving the third runway plan.

Yet in the ridiculous attempt to show that the Government is doing things for the North, the report includes various commitments for relatively small sums - such as £20m to complete the Midlands Rail Hub and, most ridiculously, the report actually mentions a new tram stop at Magna on the tram train line between Sheffield and Rotherham. There is also mention of new cycleways in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole.

The serious point here is that this is a demonstration of the way that transport planning and spending remains so centralised, despite the supposed trend towards devolution. It really should not be up to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be boasting about tram stops and cycle paths.