It’s £4.2bn over five years, which works out to £840m a year. To put that in context: the Northern line extension to Battersea, which will add two stations to the tube network, is currently priced at
£1.1bn.
I’m being a bit cheeky here (though admittedly not as cheeky as the government), because of course major transport works tend not to happen in a single year. A better way of critiquing these figures is to note that the funding will be available to eight different city regions. Split the money eight ways and you get – drumroll, please – £525m.
Once again, this is objectively a lot of money and yet also in this specific context not very much at all. Manchester Metrolink’s Second City Crossing, a 1.3km stretch of track across the city centre intended to improve capacity on the tram network, cost
£165m all on its own. A second line of the Midlands Metro, which will link Wednesbury and Brierly Hill to the network, will cost
£450m, despite the fact it uses a disused rail line. The 14km Edinburgh Tram line cost over £1bn; a 4.6km extension to Newhaven will cost another
£207m.
So I don’t want to be too sniffy about how much £525m will buy you – It clearly buys you
something. But it’s not going to come even close to sorting out the transport problems of a conurbation like West Yorkshire, said to be the largest urban area in Europe not to have any form of tram or metro network. It’s a fraction of the money you’d need to spend to build a tram network as good as Manchester’s. The idea that it’s enough to get close to a London-style transport network is laughable.
In practice, not every conurbation will get £525m. They’ll have to bid for the money, so some will get more – others may get nothing.