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Investing in transport infrastructure pays – it’s on public record that for every £1 spent, HM Treasury will eventually get £4 back. Yet rail investment too often seems disconnected with wider economic planning, particularly in respect of housing. The industry could, and should, do a lot better.
Neil Robertson, chief executive of the National Skills Academy for Rail, makes a strong case. “My house is the peak distance from a railway station. That’s ten minutes,” he says. “If it were 20 minutes’ walk away, you could knock £20,000-£50,000 off the market value of my property. Equally, if it were closer than ten minutes, that would reduce its asking price by as much as £10,000. The remarkable thing is that the railway does nothing to leverage that.”
Being within comfortable reach of a railway station is a big selling point. Ask any estate agent. But, at the vast majority of stations, neither Network Rail nor train operators take advantage of it, beyond collecting the fares.
Dr Simon Blainey at the University of Southampton has measured the effect of building a new station on house prices, and he confirms it has a significant impact on property prices within the immediate vicinity.
“Opening a local station leads to a 7.7% increase,” he says. “We looked at prices before and after the opening of 15 schemes, measured against an equal number of control areas.”
But Blainey says linking rail investment to wider planning policy has to be done at an early stage to be effective; too often rail improvements have followed other development.
“The rail operator or owner rarely gets involved in property development,” he says. “Network Rail has tended just to sell the land for others to make money.
“When a new site is developed, often the railway station follows a proven need from housing or employment that is already developed. This means it comes after people’s travel patterns have formed. There is quite a lot of evidence that the best time to influence people to change mode is when they are undergoing other major change in their lives: a new job or a new house. You need to focus on the points of disruption in their lives.”
Blainey says that if the station is near where people are moving to, they consider it as part of wider lifestyle change. Whereas if a railway station comes along after people are already happily driving to work by car, they are less likely to reconsider.
Most railway planning is done at national level. Most housing or employment location decisions are taken either locally or regionally. In consequence, the two have often not aligned.
“The best example is the contribution that developers are making to the extension of the Northern Line in London at Nine Elms and Battersea,” says Neil Robertson. “It’s unbelievable. You need to see it. Millions of cranes, all the way from Battersea Power Station back towards Vauxhall, all being redeveloped into huge blocks of flats.”
In April, two boring machines began to dig 3.2km (two-mile) tunnels to extend the Northern Line from Kennington. The £1.2 billion project is due for completion in 2020.
“The developers have paid partly for that, which is very astute of Transport for London. It has turned a corner for this kind of activity. The local authority will get that money back from the extra homeowners who will pay council tax,” Robertson says. “But elsewhere there is no proper plan, no best practice yet; no proper science to it.”
Reading’s Green Park Station is an example of that. You will not have seen it on any railway map, as it does not exist. Yet it has been planned for 15 years.
In July the Government announced it would contribute £2.3 million to the £16m cost. It was intended to serve a new industrial park and 1,500 homes built in an area bordered by the Reading-Basingstoke railway line, the M4 and the A33, the main road into Reading from the south. Reading Borough Council wanted the station ready for the opening of the business park in 1999. Now, 6,500 people work there, and the station is due to open by the end of this decade.
“We were able to work closely with Network Rail for Reading station because it was a £1 billion scheme of national importance, and the Department for Transport was cracking the whip,” explains Tony Page, Reading’s Labour lead councillor for strategic planning, environment and transport.
Green Park is not in that comfortable category. It sits between two railway regions. The western platform is in West Berkshire, the eastern platform in Reading. The council boundary is between the tracks.
“We had two identical planning applications.” says Page. “The fragmented nature of the planning system has worked against us. Network Rail has not been obstructive or unhelpful, but it is a prisoner of its own structure. It is just not set up to work with local authorities.”
The latest Government funding will ensure the station has longer platforms and canopies - £9.15m will come from the Local Enterprise Partnership, £4.6m will come from contributions by developers of the business park.
“It is a major downside of our planning system that we are not able to put in place all the infrastructure in advance, and then get it funded as areas of land are developed in the private sector,” Page complains. “We are always playing catch-up. It’s no wonder the public is sceptical about promises of improved infrastructure, because we’re always told to build the houses first.
“We have established a very good bus service, called Green Wave, with a service to the town centre every 5-6 minutes. We are building a bus mass rapid transit linking a park and ride south of the M4 motorway, Green Park and the centre, because the railway will only be able to deliver a small amount of the capacity we need.”
The intention was for Green Park to be served by the new electric trains Reading had been promised. With increased acceleration, they would have stopped at Green Park within the current two-train half-hourly shuttle pattern between Reading and Basingstoke.
“The Hendy Review made that collapse,” says Page. “So, the Department for Transport has now agreed to fund a third DMU to deliver the same level of service that would have come with two electric trains. But the buses will always deliver more people to Green Park until such time as the railway is electrified to deliver an improved frequency.
“What we planned when we improved Reading’s largest business park, with its football stadium, conference centre, school and health centre will not now materialise. So we have to turn to other means of transport.”
On a wider scale, Neil Robertson remains positive: “We’ve just done a piece of work for the Treasury which really showed the potential for linking rail with other infrastructure. Not just housing. Obviously new housing needs good transport, but that mutual dependency is not planned in any kind of systemic way.”
Robertson suggests Network Rail’s devolution of control to Route level will help, as rail managers form relationships with regional decision makers.
“That’s why the Manchester question around Transport for the North is so sharp just now. The car-use pattern there is unsustainable,” he says. “TfN is a partnership between local authorities and local economic interests, so it can really take the wider economic view, and use that to press the Government for greater investment, particularly in rail infrastructure.”
Dr Blainey contrasts that with the example of Sheffield. “When the Supertram first opened, demand predictions were based upon a lot of people living in some fairly old council estates near stations. Then those estates were redeveloped. More people bought cars and demand disappeared. There was a lack of integration between general land use planning and planning on the railway.
“Where there is more co-ordination with new housing and new stations, there is often not much interaction between the housing developer and Network Rail. They seem to have forgotten the experience of the Metropolitan Line creating Metroland early in the twentieth century, using the railway to develop housing in north west London and into Buckinghamshire.”
Paul Harwood, until recently Network Rail’s director of strategy and planning in the south of England, offers a more positive case study - Cranbrook station on the West of England line. It’s to the east of Pinhoe on the approach to Exeter, near the airport.
“The station went in pretty much at the same time as new housing. That’s a success story,” says Harwood. “Because the two happened together, a significant number of people chose to use it. They moved in with the expectation that they could get the train to work, at a point where traffic around the M5 motorway junction was becoming increasingly congested. Effective early engagement with the local authorities is a key part of our route planning.”
Today both rented and mortgaged housing in London is increasingly stretching out of range of ordinary working people on average wages. If rail is to play a fuller part in the capital’s expanding economy, it has to provide affordable travel to people on normal incomes over increasingly large distances, as workers are led to search for homes further from their places of work.
“I would argue that investment in rail is competitive compared with what you get for your money in other modes,” says Robertson. “Rail is one of the best returns on investment for the Treasury. So is energy. If you do it well, the Treasury gets back £4 for every £1 spent. Even if you do it badly, you still get half that.
“But it only works if the investment employs more people. It doesn’t matter what language those people speak, but they have to be in the UK. Crucially they have to spend their VAT here.”
