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This week’s entry reports on the Transport Committee’s report on the revised National Policy Statement for National Networks and two government responses to other infrastructure-related publications.

Transport Committee report for government response

The original and still-in-force National Policy Statement for National Networks (NPSNN), covering road, rail, and rail freight projects, was designated in January 2015, nearly nine years ago. A revised draft was published in March this year and is required to undergo parliamentary scrutiny as part of its approval process.

This was undertaken by the Transport Committee of the House of Commons, which held two days of evidence sessions on 28 June and 19 July 2023, including our own Mustafa Latif-Aramesh, who is quoted four times in the report and gave rise to at least two of the recommendations.

The recommendations can be summarised as follows:

  • Five-year review periods for NPSs;
  • The government should respond to Climate Change Committee with reasons;
  • ‘Residual’ emissions are referred to and should be defined;
  • Clarity is required on when NSIPs that increase emissions should be permitted;
  • The government should publish more of its workings: the National Transport Model; congestion forecasts; decision-making on early consideration of alternatives; ‘exceptional circumstances’ meriting later consideration of alternatives; how NPS moves away from ‘predict and provide’;
  • The government should re-instate paragraph 5.29 of current NPS (relating to SSSIs);
  • The government should consider expanding what is appropriate associated development eg / driver rest facilities; clarify AD with examples more generally;
  • There should be stronger requirements on cycling infrastructure design;
  • The NPS should be clearer on relevance to TWA-authorised projects; and
  • The government should consider an over-arching transport NPS, and explain why if not going to do so.

The government has until 20 December 2023 to respond. This report influences about 80% of the changes to the NPS before designation and the general public consultation the other 20%, in my experience, we shall see.

Meanwhile, the five draft revised energy NPSs are still stuck, with the relatively new Energy Security and Net Zero Committee yet to consider them. There have been so many recommendations from so many bodies to update NPSs regularly, and yet no one seems inclined to get things moving or even identify that this is the bottleneck.

Government response to the Transport Committee report

In other Transport Committee news, the government has responded to the committee’s July report on strategic road investment (or rather the committee has just published the response it received a month ago).

The response is here and can be summarised as follows. The government either agrees with the eight recommendations or ‘notes’ them, which is presumably a euphemism for disagreeing with them.

  • it notes a request for modelling of the Strategic Road Network and refuses to do demand management;
  • it partially agrees with the SRN meeting the fuel needs of the future;
  • it agrees with shifting the emphasis from new roads to maintenance of existing ones – bad news for DCO lovers?
  • it notes a call for more funding;
  • it notes a call for fewer complex projects given their record of delays, commenting that DCO delays have been mainly associated with legal challenges on environmental grounds (but not entirely, I would add). It says it would be unrealistic only to allow projects that could finish within a single five-year planning period – fair enough;
  • it partially agrees with more measures to assess deliverability;
  • it notes the call for more consistency between sub-national transport bodies and National Highways; and
  • it agrees that National Highways should produce a live project dashboard, saying it already does, here.

So that’s a score of 2 / 8 (if partial agreement gets half a mark). See me.

Government response to climate change committee

Finally, the government has responded to the Climate Change Committee’s annual progress report on 26 October 2023, here.

The very first CCC recommendation was ensuring the timely implementation of plans to prohibit fossil fuel boiler replacements in off-gas grid buildings from 2026, which the government extended to 2035 on 20 September 2023. The second one is about insulating privately rented homes by 2028, also gone back on in the same speech. It is mentioned a further six times in the following 170 pages of responses to recommendations. The CCC is going to be cross.

Finally, there is a list of quantitative metrics for reporting progress towards net zero, a by-product of the quashed-republished-re-challenged net zero strategy. At least zero-emission cars have gone up from 0.54% of new cars in 2017 to 16.15% in 2022. Some measures, such as rail journeys, cycling, and walking, have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Did you know that the walking target is 365 ‘stages’ per person per year by 2025? I had to look up what a stage is, it is any part of an overall trip, eg walking to a bus stop. A pretty low bar!

Without restricting Mustafa’s editorial freedom for next week, I note that the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 received royal assent on 26 October 2023, but is yet to be published in final form.

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