Better Connected Would be Better with Targets
The Yes Minister episode "The Bed of Nails" was broadcast when I was a baby.
It describes a whole series of flaws in Britain's integrated transport network. Watching the episode again, it's striking how few of the problems described in the early 1980s have been solved today. So it's great that the Department for Transport have done something that no Government has done for 25 years and actually published an Integrated Transport Strategy.
It's called Better Connected and it's the first strategy of its kind since John Prescott's A New Deal for Transport in 1998 (still on the bookshelf next to my desk). The fact that it exists at all is worth celebrating; we wouldn’t have got this document from Rishi Sunak’s Government.
So let’s start with the reasons to celebrate:
1) It exists.
2) It puts public transport front and centre is even better.
3) It has exactly the right ambitions. The introduction is explicit that we must move from a focus on modes to a focus on people. That’s spot-on.
4) It funded Mini Switzerland!
5) While it’s a long way from perfect, “practice makes perfect” (or “practice makes progress”, as my daughter rightly recently corrected me). This is the first integrated transport strategy for decades and it would be astonishing if it was right first time.
I’m hoping the Department will see this as constructive criticism for version 2 - and I hope they are already planning a version 2.
The reason I think a version 2 is needed is that this isn’t quite what many of us were hoping for, which is a strategy for transport integration.
Integrated transport or transport integration?
There's a subtle but important distinction between a strategy for transport that happens to be integrated (i.e. a single document covering all modes) and a strategy for transport integration (i.e. a strategy whose purpose is to make the modes work together). Better Connected is largely the former. It covers everything from potholes to e-scooters and rail fares to air quality and it does so competently. But there is surprisingly little about actually making services connect. What has been done is to integrate the strategies - not integrate the transport.
The very first line is spot-on:
We need to consider transport through a new lens; rather than a traditional approach to transport which thinks in terms of buses, cars or trains, we must instead prioritise how people experience the transport network as a whole.
However, I’m reminded of another episode of Yes Minister (the very first, to be precise) which included the line:
“Always deal with the difficult bit in the title. It does much less harm there than in the text.”
In this case, the difficult bit is dealt with in the Introduction, but the same principle applies. That first sentence is ambitious but the strategy doesn’t really follow through on that ambition.
The strategy lists eight priorities. Not one of them is about integrating transport services. There's a priority on integrating payments and information, which is important, but it's no good having an integrated payment if the bus leaves two minutes before the train arrives.
When I deliver my course on integrated transport (transport authorities, feel free to sign up!), I talk about four key elements:
Place
Price
Times
Convenience
All four need to be integrated for the customer to experience an integrated network, and the strategy does not cover all of them. Indeed, the rural transport section (the area where integrated transport is most essential and - currently - most starkly absent) contains ten numbered points covering everything from walking routes to self-driving vehicles. None of them actually talk about aligning bus and rail services, despite the fact that one of the strategy's few funded commitments is the Mini Switzerland integrated transport demonstrator in the Hope Valley that I’ve championed for the last year.
It’s superb that Mini Switzerland is to be funded but I would prefer it to be part of a wider transport integration drive.
A Vision without targets
The vision is that transport should be "safe, reliable, affordable and accessible." That’s obviously true but it’s always a bit of a wasted opportunity when the vision is so motherhood and apple pie. Who could argue? A good vision should be challenging enough that someone could credibly propose an alternative.
London's Mayor's Transport Strategy set an ambitious target of 80% of trips by sustainable modes. Ruter, the Oslo public transport authority, has a strategy built around the goal that public transport should offer the same seamless mobility as a car. These are visions that force choices and trade-offs. "Safe, reliable, affordable and accessible" is a description of what good looks like rather than a statement of ambition.
This matters because the absence of a challenging vision connects to the document's biggest weakness: it has almost no measurable targets.
The strategy highlights that just 14% of public transport trips involve more than one mode, and rightly notes that this may reflect poor service integration. This is spot-on. If there's no bridge across the river, few people will cross it. That doesn't mean there's no desire to. Indeed, given how many multi-modal trips will be the thousands of people pouring from trains to tubes in London every morning, that 14% figure highlights that - in practical terms - no one is making integrated journeys outside London. So given that the strategy raises the issue, how about a target to increase this percentage?
The DfT has done excellent work with its Connectivity Tool, which measures how easily people can reach key destinations. This could form the basis of a single, powerful human-centric access metric: a national connectivity score that could be benchmarked internationally. If you ran the Connectivity Tool across Switzerland, the score would be vastly higher than the UK's. That gap could define the ambition, and a series of targets put in place to measure how we’re doing in connecting real people to real opportunity.
Instead, the relevant commitment is this:
We will work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to consider the role of the Connectivity Tool in national planning policy and guidance, taking account of responses to the National Planning Policy Framework consultation.
That is, putting it mildly, rather vague.
There is a metrics table at the back of the document. Most of the metrics are sensible but the lack of ambition is palpable. The only one that could move a dial sufficiently for anyone to notice is a big increase in the connectivity score to key destinations. But even this is undefined: how many destinations? Which ones? Is it purely sustainable transport connectivity, or all modes? And - again - no targets.
The rest of the metrics are satisfaction scores and self-assessments. Looking down that list of metrics, there’s nothing that is going to fundamentally change peoples’ experience of public transport.
Now you might think I’m going on about targets too much, but you can see why it matters in the decision-making and appraisal section, which contains this line:
We want to ensure that when ministers and local leaders make decisions on transport investments, these are informed by the highest quality, objective and transparent advice, to ensure that investment decisions in all regions are given a fair assessment.
This is great but what does "objective" mean without clear targets? How is it possible to appraise a scheme's contribution to a vision if that vision hasn't been quantified? Given the well-documented flaws in traditional transport appraisal - which I wrote about in my response to the DfT's own AMES consultation - this is a significant gap. The strategy commits to publishing a new Appraisal, Modelling and Evaluation Strategy, which is welcome, but without measurable objectives for it to appraise against, it risks being a set of improved tools pointed at an unclear destination.
Is it a strategy?
A good test of any strategy is to remove everything that was already underway before it was published. A strategy should define where we are now, where we want to be and what needs to change to close the gap. Things that are already happening are - by definition - happening without the strategy. The purpose of a strategy is to guide action going forward. All the space spent restating existing press releases is, fundamentally, wasted.
I used an AI model to assess every policy statement in the document and classify each as either a restatement of something already happening or a commitment to do something new. The document contains 41 formally numbered commitments, which are genuinely new, though many are small, technocratic and without dedicated funding. Beyond these, there are 129 policies and projects woven into the text. Of these 129, 95 are things already happening and only 34 are future-focused. The text of the document is substantially a retrospective container, tying together announcements that have already been made.
This is made worse when it's infected with spin. Take this line:
To support our goals on the railways, we have provided a £27.5 billion grant to support the operation, maintenance and renewal of mainline infrastructure in England and Wales between 2024-2029.
Network Rail always has a grant. This grant is lower than normal, once inflation is taken into account. It will not support goals on the railways; it will set them back. There are political reasons why the Government has chosen not to raise income tax or employee national insurance, and the resulting fiscal constraints are real. But it is simply misleading to dress up a below-normal funding settlement as though it were part of delivering an ambitious strategy.
The fares question
The affordability section scared me and this line is terrifying:
Lower fares can then make public transport more appealing to a wider range of passengers, increasing the amount of people using the services, driving revenue and further reinvestment.
This is a remarkably bold claim to include in a Government strategy without evidence. I've written previously about the seductive "Laffer curve" idea that fare cuts increase revenue. The evidence that this is true is, putting it mildly, thin. In general, higher fares increase revenue; the demand response is rarely strong enough to offset the price reduction.
There are three possibilities.
This claim is true, in which case I'd like to see the evidence - but great.
It's not true, but the strategy will be ignored - in which case it doesn't bode well for the strategy's credibility.
It's not true, and the strategy will be implemented - in which case it would be catastrophic for industry finances and the chances of achieving anything else in the document.
I suspect it's the second, and that's not encouraging.
There is a very strong argument for resetting the value relationship between public and private transport (which can be done through a mixture of fares and fuel duty), but that’s not what the strategy says.
Payments: a decade behind, again
The simplifying payments section doesn't address the actual issues that cause fare complexity. I've written about this before: the problem isn't really "complexity" in the sense of too many products. The problem is cognitive effort, jeopardy and arbitrariness - and these require trade-offs and decisions that the strategy doesn't confront.
There's also a structural issue the section doesn't resolve. If each mayoralty, bus company and Great British Railways simplifies their own fares and payments independently, the customer's end-to-end journey could still be complex. The section describes individual modal solutions and is, ironically, not very integrated.
It is also disappointing that DfT has nailed its colours to the mast with contactless as the "preferred" payment solution. This is exactly what happened previously, with smartcards.
When Contactless was being rolled out in the early 2010s, I put a very large amount of my time into trying to get funding to include it on the Chiltern Railways route. We were very close to a deal but didn’t get it over the line. But it would have been a bespoke deal for us, with only ITSO smartcards available to every other train operator in the London area. DfT was detemindly pushing fifteen year old ITSO Smartcard technology when it was clear that Contactless was the future.
Today, DfT has just declared Contactless to be its preferred solution.
TfL rolled out contactless in London in 2011, and it's now 15 years old old. Digital pay-as-you-go is the future - it's cheaper, requires no physical infrastructure at stations, and resolves the usability issues inherent in tap-in-tap-out.
But DfT has only just caught up with sponsoring Contactless, having spent years (and over a billion pounds) backing ITSO.
There is a recurring pattern of DfT being a technology generation behind.
What's missing
Beyond the targets issue, four significant things are absent.
First, there is no serious engagement with constraining car use. The financial, climate, health and congestion arguments for managing demand are overwhelming, but the strategy is silent on road pricing, constraining parking or any demand management beyond encouraging alternatives. This is understandable politically but it means the strategy lacks a crucial lever. You cannot deliver integrated public transport while pretending the car doesn't need to be addressed.
Second, there is no serious engagement with the trade-offs that integration requires. Integration means someone has to give something up: an operator adjusts a departure time, a funding stream gets redirected, a local priority yields to a network priority. The strategy describes what good integration looks like but never confronts who decides, who compromises, and who pays.
That links to my third point which is about metrics and measurement of actual transport services. Most public transport services are measured on profitability, subsidy requirement, or - for rural services - their ability to act as a social safety net. These metrics will not generate the kinds of services we want. An integrated bus service is often less efficient from a conventional accounting perspective, both because it has to wait at stations to meet trains and because it has to be timed to meet trains. These, respectively, increase dwell times and layovers. But it is dramatically more efficient from the passenger's perspective, because it turns isolated routes into a network - meaning customer journeys become faster. Similarly, integrated fares mean that the fare earned per vehicle is lower. If we measure vehicles and routes, we will optimise vehicles and routes. We need metrics that are optimised for customers. Access (as previously described) is one, but so is measuring end-to-end customer journeys.
Finally, there is no clarity on how integrated transport is to happen, and who’s responsible. In Switzerland, the SwissPass Alliance is responsible, tying together all 250 transport operators. I spoke to its MD on the podcast and I wholeheartedly recommend a listen to get a sense of how integrated transport works in practice. There’s no equivalent here. The reason I’ve led Mini Switzerland as a volunteer is that it’s not obvious who’s actually responsible for integrating transport.
Indeed, the institutional arrangements of the UK actually make it harder. In Switzerland, transport bodies have a duty to collaborate. Here, the Competition Act makes them very nervous doing so. GBR thinks it starts and stops at the railway, Combined Authorities have only the weakest powers over GBR and in most rural areas, there aren’t even Combined Authorities. Without the institutional architecture of integration, it’s not going to happen. Even if this strategy didn’t define all the answers, it needs - at least - to raise the questions.
the highlight
The strongest section is on aligning transport and development. The principle that local authorities and developers should maximise sustainable transport interventions before considering road capacity increases is exactly right as is the long-overdue principle that transport, development and housing are one thing and need to be considered holistically across Whitehall silos. If one section of this document has the potential to shift outcomes, it's this one.
What I'd do next
I realise I’ve sounded a tad negative and that really wasn’t my intention.
The crucial thing about this document is that it means we now have an Integrated National Transport Strategy. That’s good.
Next, we need a National Transport Integration Strategy.
It can be built on Better Connected. The instincts are right and the priorities are broadly sensible. The framing around people rather than modes is right and an essential underpinning for what needs to come next.
But it needs to become a real strategy - one that defines measurable ambitions and forces choices - and it needs to properly deal with integrated transport.
My hope is that the Department will treat this as Better Connected 1.0 and spend the next year setting a small number of ambitious, measurable targets. These could include:
A national connectivity / access score.
A multi-modal trip share target.
A public transport mode share target.
They can spend some time figuring out the new institutional architecture that will make integrated transport actually possible.
Then a new version can be published next year with a bit less retrospective padding. Instead it can be a shorter, sharper description of what the future is going to look like (in numbers and words), where we are now against it and the key drivers of change.
This version can provide more clarity on demand management, the trade-offs of integration, who decides when operator and network interests conflict and how the appraisal system will be reformed to support the newly defined targets.
The last Government strategy for integrated transport was published in 1998 and is sitting on my shelf looking dusty. After it was published, John Prescott lost the transport brief and we entered the 25-year period of a new transport secretary per year that we have yet to leave.
There’s a lot to like Better Connected. Let’s build on it to create a transport integration strategy.
I do a lot of work on integrated transport, including a three day programme for Combined Authorities (and other strategic transport authorities) on becoming an Integrated Transport Authority. If interested, get in touch.
