The Scottish Budget process draws to a close this afternoon, and it’s a real mixed bag for sustainable transport.
Director Colin Howden reports on the implications of the Scottish Budget for safer, greener, fairer transport.
Active travel investment up, but commitments missed
The one clear positive is that the budget for active travel continues to rise significantly.
This is in the context of very constrained public finances and a long list of capital expenditure commitments made by successive administrations which remain unfulfilled. So we should at least be pleased that investment in improving conditions for walking, wheeling and cycling continues to receive major new investment.
But it must be noted that even the level of funds for active travel did not rise to the level to allow the Scottish Government to meet its Bute House Agreement commitment “that by 2024-25 at least £320m or 10% of the total transport budget will be allocated to active travel”.
So the active travel budget is £100 million short of what was promised.
Other areas have been affected more severely.
Bus priority veers off the road
Particularly disturbing was the decision to cancel expenditure on the Bus Partnership Fund in 2024/25.
The BPF was introduced in the 2019 Programme for Government as £500m spending commitment as a ‘climate emergency’ measure.
However, in the interim, just 6% (£26.9m) has been spent on developing bus priority and, as far as we’re aware, not a single metre of bus lane has resulted in the intervening five years. Some emergency!
Subsequent noises from government have claimed that the BPF has been “suspended” and not cancelled, but this looks very much like a cancellation to us.
Not-so-smart choices
December also saw the Government take the unexpected step of cancelling the Smarter Choices, Smarter Places programme.
This decision directly removes funding from charities and community groups working for emissions reduction in transport, and was made without setting out how transport behaviour change interventions by the third sector will instead be supported.
Now while there may be a case for rationalising investment in active travel, the decision specifically removes funding from non-active travel interventions. This fund was created to allow the support of Smarter Choices measures, because many of these measures (e.g. travel planning, shared transport) had been found by the government’s own research to provide some of the best cost-effectiveness in carbon abatement.
The cancellation of the fund also removes the sole remaining government fund open to the third sector to take action to drive modal shift from private cars to public transport.
Rail loses out to new road-building
As we commented on the day of the Budget announcement, it also features an increase in spending on roads of £210m and a reduction in spending on the railways of £80m.
The Budget announcement was followed in the Parliament the following day by a debate on the need to speed up throwing cash at the bottomless pit of A9 dualling, with the ghastly sight of the Cab Sec for Net Zero only too eager to extoll the benefits of the Scottish Government’s road-building programme.
So despite the ongoing succession of vapid policy commitments protesting otherwise, one can only conclude that, as far as transport goes, the Scottish Government is still locked into the old ways of thinking, specifically that more road-building is the answer to all our transport problems.
Further reading
Spokes, the Lothian cycle campaign, commented in much greater detail on the active travel elements of the Budget in its 20/12/23 article ‘ScotGov Budget 24/25: not what transport needs’.
Other active travel commentators have raised further queries here.
Postscript, 04/03/24:
My article accidentally omitted reference to the budget cuts also affecting the prospects for rail freight. The Scottish Budget for 2024/25 has also taken the knife to the ’support for freight industry’ budget line, with a cut from £700k to zero. It turns out that this has meant the ending of the Mode Shift Revenue Support (MSRS) grant, a revenue grant that is available to offset the cost differential of moving goods by road and rail. This grant remains available from the DfT for freight movements south of the border, so it’s very disappointing that funding has been chopped for this most sustainable way of moving goods.
