A train to nowhere?

How 80,000 pages and irregular funding lead to higher infrastructure costs

To try to plug a gap in the budget, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, scuttled the £500mn Restoring your Railway Fund last week. This means plans to reopen stations and branch lines are being reviewed and potentially scrapped across the country. Reeves said. “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.”

One of the projects at risk is reopening the branch line to the Severn Estuary town of Portishead near Bristol. While North Somerset Council has announced it is absolutely committed to reopening the line, its future is in doubt as the Department for Transport was due to fund a significant portion of the line and cover any unexpected costs.

It has been a long and complicated path for the project, which is almost shovel-ready. Its history, mammoth planning application and uncertain funding provide good answers for why new infrastructure in the UK is more expensive than other countries.

The line opened for the first time in 1867, helping grow the town of Portishead and providing access to the nearby Royal Portbury Dock. Yet it was caught up in the Beeching report, which suggested cutting 30% of Britain’s network and 55% of the stations. Whilst the track and the right of way it ran on remain, no passengers have ridden the train to Portishead since 1964. Yet almost since the last train left Portishead, residents have been keen to be reconnected to the national rail network.

The Portishead project would re-open the 3.3 miles of dotted orange line and add two stations, one at Portishead and one at Pill. (source: Bristol World)

The joint local transport plan reserved £1m to study the project in the late 2000s, and Network rail announced a feasibility study on re-opening the line in 2009. Public consultation took place in 2015, and Chris Grayling, then Transport Secretary, announced £31m of funding for the line in April 2019 (when the line was meant to open by 2021).

With this funding confirmed, the North Somerset Council began work on its planning application.

In total, the application and all the associated documents come out to 79,187 pages. If you printed that out, end to end, there’s 14.6 miles of paperwork, more than 4 ½ times the length of the line that is to be reinstated.

Within those nearly 80,000 pages, there are 17,912 devoted to the environmental statement. That’s 3.3 miles of paper trying to determine if rail transport is good for the environment. There’s 1,174 pages devoted to bat technical appendices, 215 to newts, and 1,810 to vegetation management.

It then took three years for the transport secretary to approve the planning application. This is all to replace the existing, derelict tracks with new rails and add two stations in communities that are desperate to have a rail link. If the planning process was shorter, it’s likely that spades would be in the ground now (or the railway may even be open), rather than having to review the project again. Speeding up the planning system would shorten the time that projects like this are exposed to the threat of being reviewed and cancelled, as infrastructure spending is often the easiest item for a government faced with a budget squeeze to cut.

All of these delays stop the local area from realising the benefits the railway would bring. The restored rail link is expected to carry 1 million passengers every year at a cost of £152mn, which will be split amongst North Somerset Council, the West of England Combined Authority, and the National Government. The project has a Benefit to Cost Ratio of 4.85, which is very high for a transport project (HS2’s initial estimate was 2.4 and Crossrail’s was 2.5). It would provide reliable transport for 50,000 residents straight to Bristol in 23 minutes.

Yet this could be lost because of an unwillingness to invest in capital expenditure. Failing to have consistent funding raises prices in the long term. £32m has already been spent on the planning application and design. All of this work that has been done shepherding the project through the many hurdles risks being for nothing if the project is eventually cancelled. When a future government decides that it would be a good idea to re-build the link to Portishead a lot of this work will have to be repeated, adding significant cost. Even if the project does go ahead now, time is lost as the government has to review work that has already been signed off. 

Contractors on future projects will increase their risk premiums because they don’t want to be caught out by similar changes of heart. The ability to build a pipeline of projects and learn from doing will be lost, which would have been one of the benefits of the Restoring Your Railway programme.

But perhaps more fundamentally, there’s a trust issue here. People have been desperate for a project that will benefit their local area and it's been promised for over a decade. For it to be cancelled will, justifiably, worsen people’s trust in government to deliver projects that benefit their communities.

However there is a simple solution to help fund significant parts of future railway projects, which actually borrows lessons from the Victorian railwaymen who built projects at the same time as the initial Portishead line. 

The Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government should modify its 2017 guidance on the 2016 Housing and Planning Act, which limited the number of homes that could be jointly consented with a Development Consent Order to 500. The Victorians funded many of the railways that we still rely on today by building new homes, towns, and industries alongside new tracks. We should do the same, and link up future rail projects with the building of new homes. This helps capture the value uplift that new railway lines bring, while easing Britain’s housing shortage and providing vital new transport links.

While Portishead has already gotten its Development Consent Order, the potential to fund part of the line by building new housing could be possible. Bristol has a significant housing shortage, with the average Bristolian forced to spend almost nine times their annual salary to buy a house (any ratio above 5 times annual salary is deemed unaffordable according to the ONS). Portishead would be only 23 minutes by train from Bristol city centre, allowing easy access to high quality jobs. The reopening of the branch could provide the perfect setting for a new town near Bristol, which could help fund the reopening. We need to join the construction and value of building new homes with building new railway links, which unlock huge land value uplifts.

To help lower the cost of building great projects like the Portishead Railway, we need consistent funding and reforms to our planning system to avoid 80,000 page long planning applications for 3.3 mile railways. For future projects, we need to provide an alternative funding source by allowing railways to capture the value uplift that they bring through building new homes and towns. If we’re planning on copying the route to Portishead that the Victorians built, we might as well copy how they funded the railways too.