Need for integration
There are fewer policy areas more in need of a sophisticated and committed sub-regional and partnership approach than transport services. In 2006, Eddington set out that the UK’s transport network supports some 61 billion journeys each year. Of these, 69 percent of business journeys and 84 percent of commuter journeys are less than 15 miles long.

At the same time, seamless government should be a precondition in a service area where individuals are constantly crossing administrative boundaries to get to work, to school, to college, to hospital or to visit family and friends. Equally, integrated government is necessary in an area where citizens need to be presented with clear options between different modes of transport if the UK is to achieve its ambitious environmental and economic objectives.

However, transport services in England remain far less integrated than many of their European comparators. Whilst Transport for London wields huge responsibility and power in the capital, other city regions and sub-regions are yet to be given the scope to develop appropriate mechanisms for their areas.

More must therefore be done to interconnect different modes of transport, across different geographic regions and across different tiers of government. The web of confusion that currently exists should be simplified and power and responsibility devolved to those bodies that connect with customers and citizens.

Designing new governance models
The question is what sort of governance structures would be most appropriate? And, once established, what powers and flexibilities should be devolved down?

The government has been pursuing a devolutionary journey over the past few years – the Local Transport Act 2008 encouraged greater accountability and decision-making at the local level. The Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act seeks to take this a step further and allow partnerships to establish themselves further at the sub-regional tier. The terrain is becoming more and more complex – MAAs, MAAs with statutory duties, ITAs, Economic Prosperity Boards, Combined Authorities and City Region Forerunners. Our goal should be to ensure that we have the right frameworks within which they can thrive.

In the first place, our research demonstrated the importance of a bottom-up and flexible approach to allow different areas to cultivate viable models suited to the particular circumstances of their local areas. Second, it was clear that current expectations that whole administrative areas should have to commit to specific partnerships represents an inflexible model that is likely to prevent sub-regions reflecting their economic footprints and travel patterns.

More generally, the constant is the need for commensurate powers and responsibilities. The ‘pain’, which councils and their partners may encounter (such as the loss of sovereignty, organisational and cultural change and difficult questions about membership, boundaries, democratic accountability and stakeholder input) needs to be matched with clarity over the ‘gain’ that can be won.

However, there was a widespread opinion among local politicians and officers that the ‘incentives’ had not been articulated sufficiently clearly to encourage areas to adopt harder governance mechanisms such as ITAs. Therefore, NLGN set out some ‘asks’ of central government that should help build a more accountable and responsive sub-regional governance arrangement. This should include greater flexibility over capital expenditure, an end to the bidding culture in Regional Funding Allocations, formal input into new rail franchises and control over local bus and rail networks.

This research opens up difficult questions around how councils can work together across administrative borders in a flexible and multi-dimensional way. However, a failure to put aside institutional self-interest risks failing the communities that local authorities are there to serve.

On the Right Track: new models for integrated transport by Nigel Keohane was published in July 2009 by NLGN. It was kindly sponsored by Atkins, Bircham Dyson Bell and Yorkshire Forward.