Wednesday 4 December sees the Scottish Government’s finance secretary set out the draft Scottish Budget for 2025/26. We set out here four areas where we need to see the Scottish Government take action on in order to deliver for sustainable transport.
1. Reinstate investment in bus priority
The Scottish Government had committed to providing a long-term investment of over £500m to deliver targeted bus priority measures on local and trunk roads. The intention was to reduce the negative impacts of congestion on bus services and address the decline in bus patronage. The investment took the form of the Bus Partnership Fund, together with the roll-out of infrastructure for the trunk road network.
The aim of the fund was to enable local authorities to work in partnership with bus operators to develop and deliver ambitious schemes that incorporate bus priority measures.
When it was launched formally in November 2020, the fund was hailed as a “landmark long-term capital investment of over £500m for bus priority measures” and as recently as October 2023, Cabinet Secretary Fiona Hyslop MSP declared that it was “a key area of investment”.
Despite that, the initiative has now been cancelled with only £27m of the £500m spent.
The decision to cancel the commitment to bus priority undermines efforts to improve bus service reliability and speed, which are the main barriers to bus use.
Buses are most heavily used by lower income households, so moving forward quickly with bus priority would have the greatest benefits for those people most affected by the cost-of-living crisis and bus patronage has still to recover to pre-pandemic levels, and, as expected, this has led to cuts to bus services and frequencies, and increased fares.
The fund should be reinstated and bus priority delivered, with all the benefits which that entails.
2. Invest in the healthiest modes of transport
The Scottish Government has committed to “a generational shift in funding for active travel over this Parliament”, promising that at least £320m, or 10% of the total transport budget, would be allocated to active travel by 2024-25.
It was clear for some time that the Scottish Government was going to fail to meet this promise, with £220m allocated to active travel in the 2023/24 Scottish Budget published in December 2023. However, since then, it has become apparent that the Government is further failing to make walking, wheeling and cycling the easiest and most affordable transport options for Scots, only £137m having been allocated – less than half of the funds initially promised.
Nevertheless, there has been a significant increase in investment from previous year. But this has not been backed by a feasible, strategic and long-term approach to delivering national-level improvement for walking, wheeling and cycling – and inconsistent growth in funding across a number of years has also had a significant impact. Notably, a coherent plan and process for developing and creating Scotland’s network of cycle lanes has still to be produced.
The environmental and social change that can be brought about by proper investment in active travel is evident across Europe. In Scotland, while investment has risen in recent years, action has fallen well short of what is possible and necessary. By failing to prioritise funding for these most healthiest modes of transport, the Government undermines public health, depriving communities of the infrastructure and accessibility needed to support healthier, more active lifestyles.
3. Get rail electrification plans back on track
There is no current commitment to further rail electrification work in Scotland and this poses real challenges for the future decarbonisation agenda. There has still been no update to the Rail Services Decarbonisation Action Plan of July 2020 which promised the removal of diesel trains from the Scotrail network by 2035. That is now only 11 years away.
This is not merely an environmental issue but one with very real cost implications for the future. Lee Pounder, the Regional Director for Scotland and Ireland of SPL Powerlines has warned that without a continued programme of electrification the current workforce will move away seeking opportunities elsewhere. The consequences of that loss of skills and expertise are a hike in costs when schemes are eventually re-started. Such a stop-start programme is highly inefficient and certainly not cost effective.
Coupled with the need for a continuing programme of electrification is the need to procure appropriate rolling stock to comply with the decarbonisation agenda.
The current fleet of diesel trains running in Scotland is one of the oldest in the UK and is becoming increasingly unreliable.At the Railway Industry Association conference on 3 September, Cabinet Secretary Fiona Hyslop MSP announced that a procurement exercise will begin to replace the oldest diesel trains – the High Speed Train fleet.
This was accompanied by a press release from Transport Scotland which caused some confusion as it was not clear whether the intention was to procure new bi-mode trains or replacement diesel trains. Over two months later there has been no progress although the most recent ScotRail stakeholder newsletter stated that “a commercial tender will be issued in the coming weeks”.
4. Develop new revenue sources in a time of constrained public finances
Sustainable transport is not receiving the scale of investment necessary to consistently provide compelling alternatives to private car use and flying.
Recent research has found that, in order to meet our climate targets, an additional £1.7 billion of public transport investment per year will be needed by 2035.
This comes at a time when the commercial viability of public transport services has been undermined due to the unprecedented impacts of the pandemic, but also due to long-term, and continuing, transport and planning decision-making which have favoured private car use. Meanwhile, investment in sustainable transport has in the past year been severely cut back due to the calamitous state of the nation’s finances, but also due to the Scottish Government’s own decisions to divert spending from sustainable transport into building additional road capacity.
These concerns are exacerbated by the lack of a suitable replacement for fuel duty, which generates over £2 billion of tax income in Scotland. This fund will be greatly reduced as the country shifts to electric cars.
The Scottish Ministers’ position on the condition of the Scottish public finances has typically been to blame the UK Government. While there is some merit in this argument, it does not excuse the lack of action in developing its own additional sources of revenue from within the transport sector for investment in sustainable transport.
Transform Scotland has set out within our ‘Ideas for Investment’ report the range of revenue-raising measures that could, and should, be taken forward by Local Authorities and the Scottish Government itself. These include: parking charges, road user charging, frequent flier levy, sovereign wealth fund, land value capture, and local climate bonds. Some of these measures could be implemented forthwith and some will require further thought and perhaps new legislation. But all are worthy of serious consideration, and a number of them will be required if Scotland has any prospect of meeting its traffic reduction target upon which its climate emission reduction targets depend.
