Yet another miserable chapter has now been added to Leeds’ attempts to get a tram. A report from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) was leaked and appears to show how tragically short the memory of central Government is. If accepted, it will constitute a serious delay for the prospects of a ‘West Yorkshire Mass Transit’ system (WYMT) that the newest plans detail.

Disappointing as it was for West Yorkshire to be denied a solution this side of 2030, NISTA’s secret report suggests that were the Government to follow its recommendations, they might not build a tram at all. Whilst NISTA accepted that “it may well be the case that trams are the best modal choice”, it was by no means convinced that they were. Calling for a ‘mode-agnostic’ perspective, it noted that Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) would have a significantly lower cost than a tram, whilst delivering a much better Benefit-to-Cost Ratio (BCR).

With this, one déjà vu seemed nested within another, with worrying parallels from the past. Just like with NISTA, a BCR comparison between a tram (the Supertram) and its alternatives had in fact previously been conducted, back in 2007, finding in favour of the BRT. However, when the time came to build, the BRT system was not granted planning consent (which even the Supertram achieved!) – the assumptions which showed the BRT so apparently favourable did not pass the test of reality according to the Planning Inspectorate.

The High Quality Bus Study

In 2004, the local authorities responsible for transport in Leeds were advised to explore alternatives to the Supertram scheme (a proposal for a tram network in Leeds with three lines) which had faced great cost overruns. One year later, the ‘Study of High Quality Buses in Leeds’ sought to find “whether a high quality bus initiative can deliver a viable alternative to light rail” and compared a BRT system against the original Supertram along a portion of the latter’s original route, under varying sets of assumptions.

It will be unhappily familiar to read that the BRT was compared to the Supertram and obtained a much better BCR, of 3.6 to 2.4. This, however, hinged on a critical set of assumptions, to the combined effect that a BRT system would be functionally indistinguishable from that of a tram. Firstly, that a BRT “[was] assessed economically as a new travel choice, in the same way that a tram is”, being seen by its users as sufficiently distinct to be meaningfully differentiated from a conventional bus. Or, simply put, it was seen by paying customers as more tram than bus. Secondly, given that each BRT bus was acknowledged to have around half of the capacity as a tram, it was assumed that it would be straightforward to run twice as many buses as the tram alternative, so that total system capacities were equivalent.

With these assumptions, the BRT achieved 93% of the benefits of a tram, but with significantly lower costs. However, the study acknowledged that there was uncertainty in assuming that the BRT was ‘more tram than bus’ in users’ eyes, since there had been no evidence or experience of a comparable BRT scheme in Britain. If perceived by users as essentially another kind of bus, it may still have been cheaper than a tram, but it would only have achieved around half of the benefits. Its BCR, therefore, would not have been much greater. Only the tram would have been able to deliver its scale of benefits. They actually quantified these benefits – half a billion pounds in additional ‘present value benefits’. Eventually, the test of the underlying assumptions would be made in 2016, and it revealed clear results.

The NGT Public Inquiry and the Planning Inspectorate’s Report

The High Quality Bus Study produced the successor scheme to the Supertram – the New Generation Transport (NGT) trolleybus proposal. It proposed a route along a truncated portion of the original Supertram network, following a north-south route from Holt Park via Headingley to Stourton. When the time came to act and build, however, the critical assumption of tram-parity discussed above failed. As part of a public inquiry, the Planning Inspectorate roundly rejected it, recommending the consent be refused for the entire scheme, and the Department for Transport agreed, finally killing off the scheme completely.

There were many criticisms. Its route over the same corridor would be less segregated and need a greater land take than the Supertram’s equivalent. Its interior, configured for a high intensity use with relatively few seats compared to the amount of standing room, might be a “deterrent to use and safety risk”. Journey times were calculated to be too optimistic, and worst, at the end of it, it was not found to be considered meaningfully different from regular buses.

From a customer perspective, a Stated Preference (SP) study referred to in the Inquiry found not only that trolleybuses were not found to be particularly preferred to regular buses, but that the specific type of bus to be used by NGT, a single-decker segmented articulated bus (a ‘bendy’ bus), was less preferred to modern double decker buses. Even some of the supporters of the NGT scheme said that a tram would have been preferable.

Arguably more critical, however, was that the proposed capacity revealed that the assumption of parity with the tram on this front did not hold. Even if the BRT were received by customers as a similar proposition to a tram, the system as a whole still would not have been able to have the same impact as a tram, because it would only have had half the capacity at most. BRT buses, with approximately half the capacity of a tram, would need to run buses twice as frequently to provide the same overall capacity. The NGT scheme, however, proposed to run ten buses per hour, or a bus every six minutes. Whilst a positive intervention, it would only have been equivalent in capacity to five trams an hour, or a tram every twelve minutes - hardly earth-shaking when Manchester tram services provide a combined frequency of ten trams per hour, but with much more capacity than what a BRT system could offer.

And whilst real BRT perhaps has never been tried, BRT ‘Lite’ might well be said to have been, over the very Leeds-Bradford route in question. The ‘Hyperlink’ scheme, whereby BRT-style articulated buses were deployed for the 72 bus route between Leeds and Bradford, operated buses at lower frequencies than proposed by NGT, with eight buses per hour. Eventually, its buses were retired and the route is now run by double-decker buses again, at half the frequency, hardly impacting connectivity in the region at all. It remains to be seen how a bus-based system could be devised in an already well built-up West Yorkshire which would probably need to deliver fifteen to twenty buses per hour to match a realistic tram timetable.

NGT’s BRT system could not deliver adequate benefits, considering its costs. There was “little evidence to show how the objective of maximising the Leeds economy would have been achieved” and therefore “there [was] not a compelling case in the public interest for making it, as any public benefit from public transport improvements and economic development would fail to outweigh the harm.” The Secretary of State for Transport demurred, refusing the NGT in its entirety.

WYMT vs. Supertram – a much bigger scope for trams

In retrospect it can be argued that had WYMT, rather than the Supertram, been used as the basis of comparison in the High Quality Bus Study, with the far broader WYMT in mind rather than the solely Leeds-focused Supertram, then tram-based system could have performed better against any BRT.

And it’s possible to improve plans for the tram still further.

Greater capacity can be achieved simply by using longer trams. Manchester does this by coupling its trams together, and other cities in Europe are starting to run ever longer continuous formations. The BCR comparison assumed trams were twice as spacious as BRT buses, but with longer trams, of around 50 metres in length, this could be increased to three-to-one, and the BCR recalculations very likely to be in the tram’s favour. With this sort of ratio, a tram running every fifteen minutes would need twelve BRT buses to provide the same passenger capacity; increasing this to every 6 minutes, thirty BRT buses per hour would be needed - an unfathomable proposition. Manchester’s Metrolink has also shown it is possible to run these longer formations on roads shared with other traffic, with the routes to Ashton and Eccles.

Higher speed can also be achieved using rail infrastructure, or land around rail infrastructure, to provide a more intensive service along an existing or disused corridor at relatively low marginal cost, whilst also being able to run at street-level within city centres. This has been put into practice not only in Manchester along former railway lines, but with Sheffield’s Supertram of its own, sharing track with heavy rail trains to run to and from Rotherham.

The WYMT scheme presents possibilities of using tram-trains to serve Leeds Bradford Airport via Horsforth, a sorely desired route, and also to the ‘Five Towns.’ Indeed some of the proposed routes to Bradford would use rail infrastructure corridors, an option outright impossible for a BRT, and maximising ‘tram-train’ possibilities could deliver unprecedented connectivity along this corridor, with a frequent, reliable, and fast service. High enough speeds along the Leeds-Bradford corridor could have strategic economic effects, in potentially allowing any western Bradford tram routes to be connected to this core corridor and significantly expand the one-hour Leeds economic catchment area, or ‘isochrone’.

Only Trams Will Do

This all seems awfully familiar: if this leaked NISTA report says what we think it does, then history is repeating itself in a comically tragic way. Leeds has been offered and then denied a tram before. It seems Whitehall is engaging in the same cost-benefit debacle as before, and once again, Leeds is going to end up with nothing.

Moreover, the scope is much bigger this time. It is not just the tram for Leeds at stake, but a ‘mass transit’ system for the entire of West Yorkshire. If BRT could not cater to a smaller portion of a three-leg tram network, it is laughable to suggest it might meet the needs of a county-wide mass rapid transit system. On the other hand, a more capacious, and potentially much faster, tram is perfectly suited to meet the transport challenge in this area, including future scalability.

With West Yorkshire’s new integrated ‘Weaver’ network incoming, bringing public transport all together under one name, it has to be said that all modes of transport ultimately must be cohesive. This includes both heavy rail, which needs significant work unlocking capacity at the Leeds City Station bottleneck, and indeed the traditional bus system which will always have a significant role. It is critically important that we break out of thinking in silos and create an effective multi-modal mix to deliver the greatest economic benefit.

Within this mix, the specific role of the tram can be identified as a sweet spot of medium distance, high intensity and higher quality corridors, where some segregated running is possible. This can be achieved through either central reservations as with sections of the Supertram, or ‘tram-train’ style solutions as seen in Sheffield. A greater magnitude of benefit is achieved than a bus-based solution could practicably achieve, yet the very high costs of a fully ‘grade-separated’ heavy rail or light rail solution can be avoided. Benefitting West Yorkshire rather than just Leeds in isolation demands something which can deliver benefits on a great enough scale.

With respect to taking a ‘mode-agnostic’ perspective, those who advocate for the tram by default, possibly with the view that “the term WYMT is synonymous with tram”, may do so because they tacitly grasp its inherent features, even when not explicitly articulated or advanced from first principles. Seen as a ‘street-train’, because the tram literally runs on rails, it solves the problems of steering a very long coupled set of vehicles through often tight city streets, and also of steering them at higher speeds. This enables the stability, ride quality, and interior spaciousness that leads people to subjectively judge them as being of better quality than buses, and perhaps to conclude after all that “anything less than” a tram would be “second-class”.

A generation has passed since the Supertram Act of 1993 and a generation of growth has happened, both in population and in the built environment. But there has been no growth in transport infrastructure to match this. We cannot allow this to happen again. A generation of delays has already seen costs spiralling; Leeds and West Yorkshire should not have to wait any longer.

Edmond Daramy-Williams is the Chair of LFG Leeds.

Mainstream ideas and parties have failed the British people. Their indecision and incompetence has led to the lives of millions getting worse every day.

Growth is illegal. Living standards are falling. Wages are stagnant. Large swathes of crime have become legal.

We have a plan to kickstart economic growth.

Today we’re releasing our first three policies:

1. Back British Creators. The Government is attempting to force social media companies to “privilege” content from big established companies like the BBC over those produced by independent content creators. Effective censorship like this stops jobs, money, and personal growth. To support new, growing creators, the Government must immediately abandon all attempts.

2. Quangos aren’t forever. Unelected bodies are blocking growth. They must have an expiry date and be renewed every 5 years by the Government. Those that deliver government policy should be folded back into the department; independent regulators would need reconfirmation by parliament; and other state bodies like the NAO could stay independent in perpetuity. To achieve this, the Government must pass primary legislation that explicitly places an expiry date on arms-length bodies in the UK.

3. Axe the tax trap on working parents. Parents are being punished simply for having children. A tax trap between £60,000-£80,000 means parents are facing an effective tax rate of over 50%. To give parents their pay rise back, the Government must change the High Income Child Benefit Charge so that 1% is clawed back every £400, not £200. This should be done through a Finance Bill amendment to Chapter 8 of Part 10 of Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003.

Every week for the next three months, we’ll be releasing policies that can deliver the economic growth the British people so desperately needs.

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In other words, if you’re ‘looking for growth’ as a startup, defence is not a great place to start. There is ultimately one customer, which is both indecisive and extremely demanding, both willing to commit large investments without knowing where it’ll find the money, and both willing to simultaneously add ‘gold plate’ requirements to what it’s buying while remaining obsessed with ‘value for money’. I’m not sure where I heard it first, but our procurement system can sometimes be best described as ‘doing a bad job of buying broken equipment that we don’t really need’. The list of controversies is long; the ongoing Ajax calamity, Type 45 destroyers struggling in warm waters, and the Watchkeeper drone programme, which will take 15 years and £2 billion to become fully operational, only to become functionally obsolete within 2 years and officially so within 5.

A lot of blame often gets left with ‘primes’ – large companies that directly own a contract with the MOD. However, more than anything, they are just optimised for dealing with long, uncertain procurement cycles, with a focus on maintaining traditional capabilities over newer technologies. Combined with a political obsession with SMEs, this has incentivised an ecosystem dominated by these large players, with specialist companies fitting into their supply chain as mandated. There is little room for disruption, rapid iteration, and deployment of new technologies. As a result, young companies are few and far between, leaving us unprepared to deal with the rapid proliferation of ‘software defined, hardware enabled’ technologies, even if the urgency itself is acknowledged. In Watchkeeper’s case, this meant that the ecosystem was unable to keep pace with advances in drone technology – expensive to build, operate and iterate on where the advantage is now in quick manufacturing, ease of use and modularity.

So what is to be done? Where LFG has seen success in pushing government to behave better, its greater strength is in building a network, and channeling talented, highly motivated people towards multi-decadal national challenges. New infrastructure, abundant energy, reviving British manufacturing, and cutting edge defence capabilities won’t just require better government, but also a new generation of companies willing to stick out a harsh and unpredictable business environment in the national interest. This is how I met my co-founders at Blackmoor Defence, born out of a desire to show that it is possible to start and succeed as a young company despite an inhospitable ecosystem.

Despite this, we’ve found in our first 6 months that potential competitors, Civil Servants, MOD and Armed Forces personnel have been overwhelmingly supportive. Introductions have been made, feedback on our deck and product development, and advice more generally has all been offered. Most seem genuinely excited, and maybe even slightly surprised that there are new people, with new ideas about new problems getting involved. This also means that most events even if billed for early stage companies actually end up with more SMEs present than young companies, simply because they are so rare. I am particularly grateful for the LFG x Valarian event earlier this year, which was an exception to this experience!

Universities have also been incredibly helpful, offering partnership opportunities, access to lab testing environments, demo facilities, and expertise. Sometimes, however, this can be held up by the politicisation of defence and national security on many university campuses, with projects stalled or cancelled as part of managing a difficult relationship with student unions.

Unfortunately, for all the good will, great people are held back by systemic dysfunction; opportunities will go cold due to shifting priorities, clearances will put up barriers, and people will be rotated out of their positions too fast to make any structural changes. Too often, potential partner organisations will keep a company in limbo because they don’t know what kind of commitments can be made. Having a potential customer or government partner tell us our idea is bad might hurt, but it would at least give a signal to start building something else.

Our most successful approach for getting around this has been to build solutions that we think are effective and exciting. Perhaps for all the complexity of defence as dominated by large suppliers and a monopsony buyer, the market approach of making something that solves a visible problem still works best. ‘Sea Sentinel’, our maritime asset monitoring software suite, originally came into existence because my co-founder wanted to learn about shadow fleet activity from open source intelligence.

Although starting a company is almost always fraught with uncertainty, the first 6 months of Blackmoor have made one thing very clear: defence needs more startups and young companies. There are huge gaps in the ecosystem’s ability to keep up in AI+ML, in autonomy and now counter-autonomy, in sensors, and in coordinating across all these areas and many more. There might not be VCs chomping at the bit to throw money at you, there might be a regulatory hinterland to march through, and even then, your primary customer might not even know what they want to buy from you, but if you’ve got ideas about how to solve problems for defence, I guarantee you that you’ll find people willing to do everything they can to help you succeed.

Notes:

I’ve been deliberately vague about what we’re working on at Blackmoor. If you’re interested, send me an email at john@blackmoordefence.com!

The relationship between the defence industry and growth is back in the spotlight. The Government’s predominant view is that defence should be treated as a ‘growth engine’, that investing in defence leads to good jobs all over the country, or what Andy Burnham has been calling ‘good growth’. The defence industry can certainly support this, and hope that Blackmoor can play its part in Leicester (where we’re currently based), but government investment in defence should have only one priority: increasing our ability to protect our country. Otherwise, there is a risk of creeping ‘everythingism’ at the expense of the efficacy of our Armed Forces.

John Macdonald is the co-founder of Blackmoor Defence, a new defence tech startup.

Looking for Growth do not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed in this article. Opinions are the authors only.

The honest answer is that the record is mixed at best. The transformative projects meant to reshape the national economy have been slow, expensive, and frequently truncated. The planning system has added years to delivery timelines, often for projects that were eventually approved or abandoned anyway. And where projects have been built, the economic benefits forecast in the business case have not reliably materialised. If transport policy is genuinely going to drive growth, it needs a clearer view of what works – and what doesn't.

We struggle to deliver the transformative projects that growth depends on

The UK’s inability to deliver major projects is well documented, and one transport project is the poster child of this: High Speed 2 (HS2). Conceived in 2009, HS2 was sold not just as a solution to capacity constraints on an at-capacity West Coast Mainline between London and Birmingham, but as the spine of a more productive national economy. At its maximum extent, it would connect many of the country’s largest cities and free up capacity on the wider rail network. The economic case rested heavily on the full Y-shaped network reaching beyond Birmingham to Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, and Leeds, because that configuration was what maximised the agglomeration benefits of bringing major cities closer together. The economic case of HS2 published in 2012 estimated economic benefits of £28.1 billion on the section between London and Birmingham, and £71 billion across the entire network

What happened instead is a case study in how not to deliver. Costs rose from an original estimate of around £32 billion to a range that the government now puts at roughly £88 billion to £103 billion. The eastern leg from Birmingham to Leeds was cancelled in the 2021 Integrated Rail Plan. The Birmingham to Manchester leg was cancelled in 2023, though Prime Minister in waiting Andy Burnham is seeking to revive this section. The first trains between London and Birmingham are now not expected until the late 2030s, with the full remaining scheme stretching into the 2040s. The benefit-cost ratio tells the same story in miniature. It was estimated at £2.40 of benefit per pound spent in early appraisals, was revised down to £1.80 by 2013, and the 2020 full business case put the overall programme at £1.50, with phase one alone graded as low value for money at £1.20.

Every delay makes the position worse for growth. As the Railway Industry Association and others have repeatedly noted, each element of cost rises every time the project slips, and constant uncertainty in government breeds uncertainty in industry, who in turn cannot plan their own investments. The benefits are pushed further into the future, while the costs keep climbing in the present.

The result is that a scheme originally justified as a growth project has shifted from a growth-first vision to a value-for-money rescue exercise. The cancelled northern legs to Manchester and Leeds were precisely the parts of the network expected to do the most to rebalance the economy, and their loss removed the strongest part of the original case.

HS2 is the obvious example, but it is not an isolated one. Leeds offers an even longer-running illustration. It remains the largest city in Western Europe without a mass transit system, and not for want of trying. A Supertram network was planned through the 1990s, approved in 2001, and then cancelled in 2005 by the then transport secretary after around £40 million had already been spent and the cost estimate had roughly doubled to around £1 billion. A replacement trolleybus scheme, New Generation Transport, was itself cancelled in 2016 after a further sum, reported at around £27 million, had been spent.

When the eastern leg of HS2 was cancelled in 2021, West Yorkshire was promised funding for mass transit as a consolation, and around £2.5 billion was later pledged. Yet the latest position by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority in late 2025 and early 2026 is that delivery has been reset again, with trams now unlikely before the late 2030s. A senior local councillor described the latest delay as déjà vu, drawing a direct line back to the cancellation of Supertram almost twenty years earlier. For a city whose economy and population have grown throughout this period, the cost of repeatedly starting and stopping is real.

The value of the growth forgone through these delays can be quantified. The think tank Centre for Cities has estimated that poor public transport connectivity in the five largest northern cities – Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Newcastle – costs the economy more than £16 billion a year in lost productivity, because more than four million people cannot reach their city centre within thirty minutes by public transport. Separately, the Government’s own framing of Northern Powerhouse Rail notes that lifting productivity in the major northern cities to the national average could add up to £40 billion a year to the UK economy. These figures describe an ongoing annual loss, not a one-off. Every year that transformative capacity is delayed is a year that this output is not recovered.

Planning and judicial review add years before a spade goes in the ground

The second problem sits upstream of delivery, in the consenting process itself. The canonical example is Heathrow Terminal 5. The planning application for the new terminal was submitted in February 1993. The public inquiry that followed ran from May 1995 to March 1999, sitting for 525 days, and remains the longest planning inquiry in British history. The decision to approve was not made until November 2001, and the terminal did not open until March 2008. From application to opening took around fifteen years, and from first conception in the 1980s the timeline stretches towards two decades. At the time, even supportive MPs described the four-year inquiry, and the years of delay around it, as something that should never be allowed to happen again.

The lesson was supposedly learned, and the Planning Act 2008 created a dedicated regime for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) intended to speed things up. Yet legal challenge has become a recurring source of delay. The A303 Stonehenge scheme is a notable recent illustration. Development consent for the tunnel and dual carriageway was first granted in November 2020, against the recommendation of the Planning Inspectorate. That decision was quashed by the High Court in July 2021 on grounds relating to the consideration of alternatives and the adequacy of information before ministers. The scheme was redetermined and approved again in July 2023. It was challenged again, the challenge was dismissed in the High Court in early 2024, campaigners were then granted permission to appeal, and in July 2024 the Government announced it would not proceed with the scheme at all. The net result of more than three years of legal process was a project that was approved twice, litigated repeatedly, and ultimately abandoned.

The aggregate picture is striking. In a written statement in January 2025, the Government reported that 58% of decisions on NSIPs had been subject to legal challenge in recent years. Of 30 challenges brought against major infrastructure projects, only four had resulted in a decision being overturned. On average each legal challenge took 1.4 years to conclude, the courts had spent more than 10,000 working days handling these cases, and major road projects had paid up to £121 million per scheme as a consequence of delays in legal proceedings. In other words, the overwhelming majority of challenges did not succeed, but they imposed substantial cost and delay regardless.

It is right that the public can test the lawfulness of government decisions, and judicial review is an important safeguard. The problem is not that challenges exist but that the process has allowed meritless or repetitive claims to delay projects of national importance with little ultimate effect on the outcome. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 has begun to address this, reducing the number of attempts a claimant can make to bring a legal challenge, and the Government has set out target timescales for these cases in the High Court and Court of Appeal. These are sensible reforms. But they also confirm the diagnosis. For years, a process intended to ensure good decisions has functioned as a brake on delivery, and a growth-oriented policy cannot tolerate timelines measured in decades.

We cannot be confident the forecast economic benefits will actually appear

The third problem is the least visible but arguably the most important. Even when projects are delivered, the economic benefits set out in their appraisal often fail to materialise as forecast. This matters because the entire system of prioritisation rests on those forecasts. The Department for Transport’s appraisal framework, Transport Analysis Guidance, produces benefit-cost ratios that determine which schemes are judged good value and therefore which get funded. If the forecasts are systematically optimistic, the whole basis for allocating capital to growth is compromised.

The evidence that this happens is reasonably consistent. National Highways runs a structured programme of Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE), comparing the actual impact of major road schemes one year and five years after opening against what was forecast. The meta-analysis of these evaluations found that observed traffic flows were generally lower than predicted. Individual scheme evaluations tell the same story. The widening of the M27 between junctions three and four, for example, delivered lower than expected journey time savings as a result of lower than forecast traffic volumes, and its outturn benefit-cost ratio came in below the figure used to justify the scheme.

This is not a peculiarly British phenomenon. The academic literature on transport appraisal, most prominently the work associated with Bent Flyvbjerg, has documented a persistent pattern in which costs come in higher and benefits come in lower than predicted at the appraisal stage. One ex-post study of road projects in Denmark found that actual traffic volumes were on average around 7% lower than forecast, a bias that is statistically significant and matters a great deal for congested networks, where benefits are highly sensitive to traffic levels. HS2 is again instructive. Its falling benefit-cost ratio over time, as costs rose and the network shrank, shows how much the headline appraisal figure can move between the decision to build and the reality of delivery.

The point is not that appraisal is worthless or that every forecast is wrong. It is that a policy genuinely oriented towards growth should treat appraisal forecasts with appropriate caution, invest far more in measuring what schemes actually deliver, and feed that evidence back into future decisions. At present, the gap between forecast and realised benefits is large enough that confident claims about the growth impact of any individual scheme should be read sceptically.

If the record is as patchy as the evidence suggests, the obvious question is what a genuinely pro-growth transport policy would look like instead. The answer is that it should be organised around mobility. The economic value of transport comes overwhelmingly from connecting people to opportunities, jobs, customers, suppliers, education, and from connecting businesses to one another and to a larger pool of workers. This is the mechanism behind agglomeration – that better-connected labour markets are more productive. The number of opportunities a person can reach in a reasonable time is therefore the right lens because it is the thing that actually drives growth, rather than speed or capacity for their own sake.

Several priorities follow from putting this at the centre.

Fast and frequent inter-urban travel matters, but the need varies by region

Connecting cities to one another quickly and reliably expands the effective labour market and allows firms in different places to trade ideas and services. But the case for investment is not uniform across the country. The British network is comparatively good at north-south journeys to and from London and comparatively poor at the east-west journeys between cities in the North and the Midlands. For example, travelling between Birmingham and Nottingham by rail takes around one hour and fifteen minutes to cover a distance of just over fifty miles. Meanwhile, from Birmingham to London, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles, takes just one hour and nineteen minutes by rail.

The North is the clearest example of where the gap is most damaging. While four fast trains an hour run between Leeds and Manchester, two of the largest economies in the country, this hides some serious structural deficiencies. These services are often overcrowded, with trains often running with fewer carriages than timetables, and trains taking three-quarters of an hour to cover thirty six miles. Compare that to services running between London and Peterborough, which take around the same time to cover seventy-four miles.

The Northern Powerhouse Rail Partnership has estimated that a line linking just Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford could add around £22 billion in gross value added to the northern economy and raise productivity in those cities by up to 6%. The contrast with Scotland’s Central Belt, where better connections between Edinburgh and Glasgow have helped pool the labour market and support productivity growth, shows what is possible when dense urban areas are properly linked. Investing in fast, frequent inter-urban connections is therefore a real growth lever, but the priority should be the corridors where the current offer is weakest and the agglomeration potential is greatest, which means east-west connectivity in the North above almost anything else.

High-quality urban public transport is essential, and trams and metros should be its backbone

The most consistent finding in the evidence concerns travel within cities rather than between them. Centre for Cities has shown that, on average, only around 40% of people in Britain’s big cities can reach the city centre within thirty minutes by public transport, compared with roughly 67% in comparable European cities, such as Copenhagen and Munich. The comparison between similarly sized cities is stark. In Leeds, fewer than four in ten people can reach the centre in thirty minutes, while in Marseille it’s close to nine in ten. British cities are consequently economically much smaller than their populations suggest, because a large share of their potential workforce simply cannot reach the centre quickly. This is why poor urban connectivity, rather than poor inter-city links alone, sits at the heart of the productivity gap.

Trams, light rail, and metro systems should form the backbone of urban networks, because they offer the capacity, reliability, and attractiveness that high-frequency travel into dense centres requires. The successes already exist and are instructive. Manchester’s Metrolink, the Tyne and Wear Metro, the Nottingham Express Tram, and the West Midlands Metro have all demonstrably reshaped how people move and where they can work. The problem, as the Leeds story shows, is that Britain has been chronically bad at delivering these systems, and it builds them at far higher cost than comparable European cities.

This is precisely the gap the Government’s new Mass Transit Taskforce, launched in 2026 and chaired by Bridget Rosewell, is meant to close. Bringing together expertise from transport, planning, finance, industry, and academia, it has been asked to identify the barriers in planning, financing, and land acquisition that slow these schemes down and to recommend practical reforms, with initial recommendations expected within months. It sits alongside the £15.6 billion committed to Transport for City Regions in the 2025 Spending Review. The right ambition is not simply to fund these networks but to accelerate their delivery, so that cities stop spending decades planning systems that are then cancelled. Building the routes is necessary but not sufficient. The evidence also shows that the low-rise built form of British cities means fewer people live close to transport, so denser housing around stops and stations is part of the same agenda.

Roads matter, but economic gains often come through unexpected routes

Investment in roads remains important, particularly for freight, for areas poorly served by rail, and for journeys that public transport cannot realistically replace. But a pro-growth policy should be clear-eyed about where the economic returns from transport investment actually come from, because the intuitive answers are often wrong.

The clearest example is the relationship between car access, free parking, and the health of high streets. Retailers consistently believe that most of their customers arrive by car and that free or convenient parking is essential to footfall and sales. The evidence does not support this. A widely cited study of two shopping streets in Berlin found that only around 7% of shoppers had arrived by car, against the roughly 22% that traders estimated, and that more than 90% of takings came from people who walked, cycled, or used public transport. A review of commercial centres in Greater London reached a similar conclusion, finding that retailers vastly overestimate the role that free parking plays in their success.

The positive case is set out in the Pedestrian Pound research published by the charity Living Streets, most recently updated in 2024. It finds that people who walk to the high street tend to spend more over a week or a month than those who drive, that streets where the pedestrian experience has been improved have seen footfall rise by around 20-35%, and that well-designed schemes can lift retail sales by 30% or more. The implication for policy is important. Some of the most cost-effective ways to support local economic activity are not large road schemes at all, but relatively cheap improvements to walking, public realm, and the quality of place. A growth strategy that defaults to road capacity and free parking as the way to help town centres is likely to be spending money in the wrong place.

Define and measure

Finally, a policy needs metrics that measure success and failure. Too often, transport investment is judged by inputs and outputs that are easy to count, miles of road, billions of pounds committed, or by forecast benefit-cost ratios that, as set out above, are not reliably borne out.

Two metrics deserve to sit at the centre instead. The first is the number of people who can reach key economic hubs, principally city centres and major employment sites, within thirty minutes. This directly captures the size of the effective labour market and therefore the agglomeration benefits that drive productivity. It is also actionable. Centre for Cities has estimated that better integration of existing networks in England’s next six largest cities, through aligned timetables, integrated ticketing, and faster, more frequent buses, could connect around 1.2 million more people to their city centres within thirty minutes and boost national output by an estimated £17.4 billion a year. That is a larger and more certain return than many headline capital schemes, and it flows from improving mobility rather than simply adding infrastructure.

The second metric is reliability. A service that is fast on paper but frequently late or cancelled does not expand the effective labour market, because people cannot depend on it to get to work on time. Reliability is consistently undervalued in appraisal and underweighted in public debate, yet it is central to whether a network actually delivers what it promises. The unreliability of TransPennine Express services are a standing example of how poor performance shrinks the practical reach of a network well below its theoretical reach.

Rhetoric not reality

So British transport policy has called itself pro-growth for years. But its record suggests the label has run ahead of reality. The transformative projects meant to reshape the economy have been slow, costly, and cut back. The consenting process has added years and, in some cases, has delivered nothing for the delay. And the benefits forecast in business cases have too often failed to appear once schemes are built.

A genuinely pro-growth policy would start from a different place. It would treat the number of people and opportunities that can be reached in a reasonable time as the organising objective. That means prioritising fast and frequent inter-urban links where the current offer is weakest, especially across North England. It means building high-quality, reliable, and attractive urban networks with trams and metros at their core, and delivering them far faster than we have managed to date. It means recognising that some of the best economic returns come from cheap improvements to the public realm rather than from road capacity. And it means measuring success by how many people can reach economic hubs quickly and reliably, rather than by how much has been spent. Growth has been the stated goal for a long time. This is how a transport policy would actually achieve it.

James Gleave is the Founder and Director of Mobility Lab UK. He writes regularly on his Substack, Mobility Matters.

Looking for Growth do not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed in this article. Opinions are the authors only.

Transcript:

Financially and environmentally, this is a no-brainer, for everyone except one person.

***

It’s not your imagination: Britain really does have some of the highest energy prices in the world, and it’s a huge problem.

Hi, I’m Will Hodson. I ran a business that reduced people’s energy bills automatically. We actually went on Dragons’ Den — very cheesy, I know — but we managed to negotiate what was the best deal in the history of the show. We helped people switch to the cheapest provider. But nowadays, every provider is expensive, and that’s because our system is broken. We need to fix it, and it’s really not that complicated.

But the first question is: how did we get here?

Let’s start at the beginning – the beginning of the last industrial age.

Then, as now, manual processes gave way to machine-powered automation, all enabled by cheap, abundant energy. Don’t forget that when Britain was an industrial superpower, we were an energy superpower too. In fact, by the middle of the 19th century, Britain produced two-thirds of the world’s coal. It was cheap, it was reliable, it was secure. Coal was all we needed.

The problem only became clear about 100 years later: we were too reliant on one fuel. In 1947, a shortage of coal forced the Attlee-led Government to shut down industry and impose blackouts. At the same time, coal-mining unions were becoming more powerful. This meant coal was less cheap and less reliable.

By the 1950s, another drawback was becoming clear. We didn’t know about climate change yet, but we knew coal was dirty — a pollutant — and the Great Smog of 1952 killed upwards of 10,000 Londoners. The Government acted, and in 1956, it passed the Clean Air Act. It was a sign of the times that London’s new power station, Bankside — which you and I know as Tate Modern — was quietly repurposed from burning coal to burning oil.

But our new reliance on Middle Eastern oil came at a price. A shortage of supplies in 1956, after the Suez Canal crisis, saw the Government impose rationing from Christmas of 1956 all the way to May of 1957. The country was in such a desperate state [that] the Prime Minister resigned.

Something more positive was happening in 1956, however: Britain opened the world’s first civil nuclear power plant. There were hopes that we were at the dawn of a new nuclear age, with limitless, almost free energy. By 1970, nuclear accounted for about 10% of our electricity generation. Fundamentally, however, we remained reliant on coal and overseas oil – and we were made to pay.

In 1973, the Yom Kippur War led to an explosion in the price of oil. This hit Britain hard: a three-day week, runaway inflation, and rolling blackouts. We needed coal, and the coal-mining unions knew it. With grievance and a golden opportunity to negotiate, they went to war with Ted Heath. Once again, due to an energy disaster, the Prime Minister of this country went down in flames.

But something was happening in the background that would change everything: we were discovering our own oil and gas reserves in the North Sea. By the time of the next oil crisis in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution, Britain was on the verge of becoming a net oil exporter. Oil revenue was what funded the entire political project of the 1980s, from tax cuts to welfare spending.

But we weren’t the only country that discovered North Sea oil. Norway did too, and they took a slightly different approach with their oil revenue. Norway used the tax receipts to create what is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, worth over two trillion dollars. That fund supports essential Norwegian services, which means that every single Norwegian benefits from Norwegian oil – which is something for us to bear in mind.

By 1990, Britain was looking past oil for various reasons. We needed to fund different technologies – mostly nuclear, but also renewables. The question was: how?

And the answer is a historic aberration that we are still living with.

The Energy Secretary at the time, a man called John Wakeham, didn’t want an argument with the Chancellor, so he put a tax on everyone’s energy bill and he called it a levy. Economists hated it, saying the tax made us uncompetitive and would drive industry abroad. Voices in Labour said it was regressive, because it was a tax on an essential that everyone used alike. They were both right – but 36 years later, the hack lives on.

And it gets worse with age. Because levies now fundamentally contradict one of our great renewable objectives: electrification. Levies are heaped overwhelmingly on electricity rather than gas. So levies make it more expensive to switch to electric vehicles instead of petrol cars, or to electric heat pumps instead of gas boilers –when all of our other policies try to make it cheaper. Everyone knows it’s bonkers.

But there is one beneficiary which refuses to let levies go: the Energy Department. Levies have made them a Second Treasury, able to raise and spend billions of pounds with precious little scrutiny. All in all, levies have bloated our bills by hundreds of pounds – and cutting levies remains the only way to cut people’s bills overnight.

In fact, it happened in the mid-90s. We sold off nuclear power that we’d subsidised, so taxes came down and bills dropped by 8% immediately. But no government wanted to give up this easy access to raising taxes.

In 2002, the Government used the energy levy to fund the Renewables Obligation. And this is the start of the modern energy era. Climate change was looming large; we’d just ratified the Kyoto Protocol pledging action. And so we entered a brave new world, where we would contract with big business to build out renewable energy in Britain.

Now, something needs to be said at the outset here: renewable energy corporations are not charities. They negotiate with our government for as much money as they can possibly get. The big question has always been: how well would our government negotiate on our behalf?

As a basic principle of negotiation, if you can walk away from the table – if you have lots of other options – you’re in a good place to negotiate. But in negotiations with the renewables industry, we’ve had the opposite, because we’ve written into our law our commitment to get a certain amount of energy from renewable sources each year.

That’s why, in 2013, renewable companies extracted a strike price for offshore wind that was three times the prevailing wholesale price, because they knew we were desperate to get the industry going. And that’s why, in 2023, when the Government tried to drive a hard bargain, for once, the renewable industry just walked away. They knew we’d come crawling back to hit our targets, and when we did, we coughed up a 66% price increase.

So why would you tie your hands with targets? Because energy policy has become climate policy, and climate issues engender moral absolutes.

Now, I’ll put my hands up here. When I was 26, I had just seen An Inconvenient Truth, I had shadowed a former Green Party MEP in Brussels, so I fully supported the Climate Change Act. Given the urgency of climate change, I have to say, I didn’t have much time for people who opposed it either.

But my support wasn’t just born of youthful zeal – it also reflected the outlook of my country. Britain had enjoyed 20 years of economic growth over two and a half per cent.

I thought that would continue, and I was wrong.

Since 2008, our growth rate has collapsed to less than 1% a year. It’s also the case that our bills have risen steadily.

Britain today is a very different country, with very different challenges and a very different mindset. But we have the same Energy Secretary – and I’m not sure his mindset has changed at all.

Ed Miliband first became Energy Secretary in 2008, and as leader of the opposition, then Shadow Energy Secretary, for 20 years, his agenda has dominated UK politics. This is Ed Miliband’s energy policy. The rest of us just live in it.

What’s become clear is that Miliband’s moral mission has presented a huge payday for giant renewable companies who cannot believe their luck. There are signs that the UK energy system has been captured by the renewables industry.

For example, we have paid them to build out far more offshore wind than we can actually use. So when the wind blows, we often get to a point where our cables cannot handle any more load – and under the contracts that our government has entered into, we pay those wind turbines to turn off. That’s called curtailment. Last year, curtailment cost us £1.5 billion. And they’re still handing out contracts. By 2030, this same system could cost us £8 billion – £8 billion to throw energy away.

This isn’t about policy anymore. We’re talking here about scandal, and it needs investigation.

The thing is, I’ve always believed in renewable energy. I bought into the idea that it was cheap, because when the wind blows and the turbines turn, the marginal energy costs nothing. But I also bought into the idea that renewable energy was cheap because I really, really wanted to believe it was true. So I didn’t count the high costs of the advance contracts that made the marginal costs irrelevant. I didn’t count the costs of curtailment, or of connecting remote renewables to the national grid – all of which are paid by us, the billpayer.

When you add that all up, some estimates say that renewable energy costs us more than twice as much as the price agreed in contracts. The government is not revealing the full cost of renewables, because it will be embarrassing. This has to change.

But calculating the true cost of renewables is not designed as an exercise in humiliation. It serves a hugely important purpose for negotiations: if we can calculate the true cost of renewables, we can challenge renewable generators to bring their prices closer to alternative energy sources.

In the near term at least, there will need to be alternative energy sources, because the wind won’t always blow and the sun won’t always shine. Anyone who says different is telling you a fairy tale and treating you like a child. The UK needs baseload energy for those situations, which historically has come from coal, nuclear, or gas. Coal is too dirty; nuclear is not yet ready; so that leaves gas. And even Ed Miliband’s own Energy Department acknowledges that we need gas well into the next decade.

So let’s work out where we get that gas from. The first question is: do you want gas, or Liquefied Natural Gas?

Liquefied Natural Gas is the same product as gas, but highly processed so it can be transported around the world. The processing is highly carbon-intensive and expensive. It comes largely from the Middle East, and much of it was backed up in the Strait of Hormuz for weeks. Higher cost, higher carbon footprint, higher risk – Liquefied Natural Gas is not ideal. Not when you have gas in the North Sea.

So the second question is: do we want Norwegian gas, or British gas? Well, if we use our own gas, we can use our own pipelines, support our own industry, and generate tax revenue for our own country – and this can support people who are crying out for help. Remember, that’s exactly what Norway do.

Financially and environmentally, this is a no-brainer, for everyone except one person. And he just happens to be our Energy Secretary.

Ed Miliband will go to his grave insisting that he’s right. The question is whether he takes this country with him.

Energy policy is that important. When people get it wrong – like in the 1950s, like in the 1970s – heads should roll. But at crucial moments, this country has managed to get things right.

One hundred years ago, the Electricity Supply Act saw a country that was on its knees rise up and create the world’s first central electricity grid. Britain — apparently fading, apparently in decline — showed the world the way. At that time, Britons lived at the mercy of ragtag energy companies, electrifying only the streets that could pay. But with one almighty effort, against the darkness of the Great Depression, that all changed. People who hadn’t had work for years showed themselves to be heroes, planting 4,000 miles of cable across this land. And that one Act brought communities, from Cornwall to Caithness, into the light. We saw clearly what needed to be done, and we did it.

So, with all the problems that Britain faces in its energy system today, 100 years on, I still believe that we can turn things around, with a single Act of Parliament. Because we’ve done it before. We can do it again.

LFG will fix it

Today we’re launching LFG’s Emergency Energy Bill: a ready-made Bill that the Government could pass tomorrow. Here’s how it will bring your bills down.

First, scrap all levies from energy bills. Whatever your politics, they should never have been there in the first place.

Second, lift the ban on new licences in the North Sea. Whether we like it or not, we need gas – so let’s get it at the lowest cost, with the lowest carbon emissions, by using our own reserves. What’s more, we demand that the tax revenue from North Sea oil goes directly towards reducing our bills. The Government has this power to help every household in the land.

But that’s not all.

We’ll demand an investigation into the curtailment scandal that’s costing billpayers billions. By 2030, we’re on course to pay offshore wind giants £8 billion to turn off their turbines. Sometimes we pay the same company to curtail wind in Scotland, and then fire up gas to replace it in England. Something is seriously wrong.

We believe Ed Miliband’s system has been captured by the giant companies behind renewables. There should be no more offshore wind contracts until the government accounts for its full cost, including curtailment, and including the costs of connecting them to the grid. These are costs that energy companies should pay, because the British billpayer cannot afford to pay anymore.

In fact, we’ll challenge energy companies to bid to move up the queue to be connected to the grid. The revenue that generates will go direct to reducing your bills.

The Bill will also scrap the Clean Power 2030 targets. Those targets have pushed civil servants to procure wind at any cost, rather than focus on electrification.

Finally, we will simplify the statutory duties of the energy regulators, NESO and Ofgem. They’ll no longer have discretion to balance Net Zero, energy security, and efficiency. Instead, they’ll be focused simply on minimising costs in Britain, subject to security of supply.

We are not giving up on climate change. But we can’t solve it all on our own anyway. At best, Britain can be an example to other countries — and we are, at present, an example of how not to do it.

I’ll level with you: there’s no time to waste. So I’ll finish where I started. Britain has some of the highest energy prices in the world. Our Emergency Energy Bill will provide immediate relief for our industries, and for the millions of households who are struggling to afford the basics.

To support our Bill, go to lookingforgrowth.uk/saveus. Please share this video far and wide, because the British people deserve to hear the truth.

Thank you.

It should not take a movement, or a series of national and local campaigns, to force governments to tackle the cost of living, and to promote rising living standards. It shouldn’t but it does.

This is the movement for personal, social, economic, and national growth.

today’s launch

Today we’re launching Radical Honesty – LFG’s all new Substack about what has gone wrong, and what is needed to put it right.

We want your thoughts, and your ideas.

We will be running articles and essays written by founders, entrepreneurs, officials, campaigners, researchers, people that have just tried to build something – big or small. We want historical reflections, policy proposals, political and policy analysis, and personal accounts of people who have been helping to reverse decline. We want to examine what has gone wrong, highlight efforts to rebuild and renew, and explore serious ideas for how we can turn our nation around – and more. We want radical ideas – that means we will publish things we don’t necessarily agree with. We want to stoke a debate that will challenge the status quo.

In short, we will be publishing interesting work on areas concerned with personal, social, national, and economic growth.

If you want to contribute, please get in touch by emailing press@lookingforgrowth.uk