News and Blog

New national planning rules. What do they mean?

4/16/2018

Government claims that National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) ‘is a key part of the government’s reforms to make the planning system less complex and more accessible’, but since introduction in 2012 they have acquired a thick layer of decisions, appeals and court cases. Add in almost annual changes and they are now just as complex as the policies they replaced. Over 80 changes are proposed but will they make a difference?
Most could be summed up in one word – ‘tinkering’. But there are some changes in emphasis:
·         Viability is a sore issue for both developers and Councils, with time and money wasted by both developers grappling with difficult and marginal sites, and Councils who see that development profits have never been higher. The new wording is unlikely to end the controversy, although ‘standard inputs’ may end some of the bickering.
·         Housing Need Assessments get a long overdue standard methodology, and this will save a lot of money. However, the new method is biased towards more building in areas with high prices, despite no proof of a link between supply of new houses and house prices (the reasons are more complex and mostly related to the local economy). Poorer areas that desperately need housing regeneration ironically will have less incentive to build.
·         Housing Delivery Tests for local authorities are introduced. These will make it easier to get planning permission if the local authority hasn’t got enough land allocated. It is a blunt instrument. Some authorities simply have very little suitable land and overheated economies. Good for developers but look out for some very upset local communities.
·         Green Belt policies get new wording (para 132-6) but retain strong protection. Lawyers are will benefit from interpreting these changes.
·         Air Quality is slightly strengthened following multiple court defeats to the Government over inadequate plans to combat air pollution. Clear Air zones are introduced, but general opinion is that these will be ineffective and the Government will be back in court soon.
·         Ancient woodlands and other ‘irreplaceable habitats’ get stronger protection, although very few genuinely important habitats are lost each year; the real issue is agricultural practices.
This is a difficult balancing act for the Government – they clearly want more land including Green Belt released for house building, but their supporters won’t accept erosion of the Green Belt. They won’t accept the real solutions which include regional planning, rebalancing the economy away from the southeast to areas that want development, and they can’t accept that the market is not the solution to everything – for instance encouraging Council and other social housing. It was good enough for Churchill and Macmillan, so I don’t see why the concept is so difficult for Conservatives of today. But it will make for an interesting couple of years in planning.
Should you require further advice on the NPPF please do not hesitate to give Peter Black a call on 07505221405 or email peterblack62@gmail.com. First half day work is free for new clients.

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Cardiff Blues

10/27/2017

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Another death - Northern transport cc

8/12/2017

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It's August, and electrification schemes all over Britain are cancelled, including TransPennine. Austerity is still here, so training, investment, hope, will have to wait another five years. 'Northern Powerhouse' was only launched in 2014 but is now as distant a memory as Cameron and Osbourne. Northern England sees cash spent on Northern Ireland (£100m per MP) and London Crossrail 2 instead.

It all felt different in June as over 200 of the great and good of the north gathered in the swanky Manchester Midland Hotel for the Northern Transport summit 2017. But dreams fade quickly.
To recap, the stuttering northern economy is outperformed by the south, which also has higher education standards from secondary level. The London black hole becomes denser as all investment and talent is sucked into it. The further south you go, the easier it is to justify decent public transport: anything built fills up with passengers, and the economy can support local contributions from both the public sector and business. There’s not really any room for new roads, and the price and sort supply of land encourages denser communities and more walking and cycling, which in turn creates a better quality of life. In contrast, northern cities and communities are starved of public transport investment, lack skilled people, are poorly connected and find it hard to attract quality jobs outside the big cities. Northern railways are filled with slow, old diesel trains, the roads are filled with commuters and goods that should (and in other European countries would) be on rail and tram, and by dirty, lowest common denominator buses. The potential of cycling is untapped and everything is expensive, poorly co-ordinated and difficult to use. And it rains more. Welcome to the North.
At the Northern Transport Summit, Paul Swinney from Centre for Cities gave a solid and fact-based presentation that suggests that the north is a series of economies, not just one. Cities attract and generate the best jobs, but northern cities are key underperformers with skills and access to skilled labour the key reason. He painted a bleak picture of low skilled, poorly paid jobs in suburban call centres and distribution depots served mainly by congested roads. Sunderland, despite Nissan came in for special mention. He suggests that intra-regional transport is the main transport challenge, although the rest of the summit focussed on glossy inter-regional solutions: Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR): not High Speed 3 as it will not be high speed or trans-pennine motorway tunnels. Trams are obviously not sexy enough.
Light relief was provided by Jesse Norman (Eton, Merton, dad called Sir Torquil), Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport. Only in post 7 days, his civil servants put together a wiki-speech with plenty of northern facts, but he didn’t know anything about anything. He wanted us to have a single voice. Great - let us know when you have something to say, Jesse. Of course, when he did have something to say (August), it was to tell the north that the cupboard was bare.
Quaintly, the dilemma for most participants was how to big-up their areas, companies and contributions while trying to make a case for investment in northern transport. Liverpool concentrated on NPR and the port. Cumbria points out that it is more than the Lake District. Is it? Lancashire look longingly at the unitary Greater Manchester system and wants to improve East-West links. Why, when the main economic focus is south to Manchester and Leeds? Sheffield is more interested with internal connections. Apparently 2 pairs out of the 4 South Yorkshire centres (Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley Rotherham) don’t have direct rail links. Can you guess? I couldn’t. And Manchester is the centre of the universe, has the biggest airport and wants NPR.
New GM Mayor Andy Burnham gave a rousing speech. He recognises the need to break through the Treasury appraisal rules, a key thread of the event. Now London Crossrail is almost finished, Crossrail 2 is taking shape. It is obvious to everyone in the room that using conventional appraisal NPR is a dead duck and Crossrail 2 will overtake NPR in the funding queue. But no one was brave enough to say it out loud. Come August the obvious has happened and London gets the investment and overheating again.
Highways England explanation of how they have got on and built roads and bridges contrasted with the highly defensive attitude of Graham Botham from Network Rail when challenged on high costs and poor project management. And this highlights a real problem: rail projects take decades and are risky, road projects are much easier. We’ve been here before. Recent northern history has seen integrated transport packages created, but only the roads get built. Perhaps Highways England should build our new rail lines? If we get any, that is.
Overall the impression was of some dedicated and passionate professionals looking for the right transport solution for the north. But I do wonder if everyone has been seduced by the glamour of new, almost-high-speed rail lines when currently 3-car diesel trains on a 2-track railway chug between Leeds and Manchester, held up by 2-car local trains. Transpennine electrification was announced in November 2011 and would reduce journey time, increase capacity and improve comfort but no progress is visible on the ground after six years. Why not?
As John Swinney pointed out, intra-regional transport is a key factor in attracting quality jobs. Manchester wants to be a world city but doesn’t even have a Metro, and local transport in Leeds is based on primitive buses. Thank goodness Liverpool built their Northern and Wirral lines tunnels in the sixties – they certainly wouldn’t be able to now.
What is my prescription? First, it is essential that Manchester-Huddersfield-Leeds TransPennine electrification is completed as soon as possible. This should come with some limited line speed improvements and at least some four-tracking to allow fast trains to pass slower passenger and freight trains. Much of the route was originally four-track, so this should all be possible within the existing railway. There is plenty of decent quality surplus electric rolling stock available in the southeast.
Secondly, Manchester as the major growth generator in the north needs to start work on a tunnelled metro connecting electrified suburban lines. Metrolink is a good start, but it is slow and the city centre saturated with trams. A proper Metro would dramatically improve connectivity and unleash urban regeneration particularly to the north of the city where huge areas of derelict or underused land is available.
Everywhere there should be a focus on urban renaissance and walkable, cyclable communities based around fixed transport links. This is not rocket science and a quick Ryanair trip to any German city will explain how it can be done.
And we need to bin all those road proposals. They evidence is that they lead to dispersed, low quality and poorly paid jobs, and disparate, unconnected settlements with a poor sense of community. At the top of the pyramid the proposed tunnelled Transpennine motorway is a hugely destructive and wasteful scheme. We can do better than this.
Posted by Peter Bla

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Northern Transport Summit

6/27/2017

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Cycling in circles - wake up Manchester

12/14/2016

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The National Cycling Centre was Britain's first indoor Olympic cycling track; VisitManchester says it’s ‘a bike-friendly city with many marked cycle lanes and dedicated routes throughout the city centre and beyond’. Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) aims to make cycling ‘a mainstream, every day and aspirational form of transport’. I hired a bike from Oxford Road station, headed into the University area to see the excellent new Elizabeth Gaskell House museum, then across to Salford Quays for some ‘iconic’ architecture at Media City to test it out.

For those used to brutal concrete, Oxford Road is easily the best 1960s station in the country. A beautiful and recently sympathetically restored laminated wood structure was needed to keep the weight down. Now it has a ‘Cycle Hub’, which contains Northern Rail’s ‘Bike and Go’ operation. Register and for the day you can hire a beautiful red Dutch bike (the trains were run by Dutch Railways until early 2016) for about the price of a pint.
Immediately outside the station the first junction is an intimidating mess dominated by buses, white vans and taxis, but at least the weight of the bike helps with the potholes. Down Oxford Road a lot of money has been spent on new cycle lanes but these aren’t continuous. A lot better than nothing, but I feel safer in the main carriageway. At one corner roadworks have exposed 1960s tram lines, while I count no less than 13 buses waiting in line at the traffic lights. Perhaps this is a clue. Maybe instead of trying to make buses and other road vehicles happy, we should remove the vehicles along the busiest bus route in Europe and have a tram, or even an underground Metro with the space given over to people in what is one of the largest concentrations of students in Europe?

Having paid my respects to Elizabeth Gaskell I head west. You would expect the University area to have good links to Salford Quays with BBC, MediaCity and other cultural attractions. But you would be wrong. Stretford Road is wide, straight and was supposed to be the New Naples: the arch and some of the architecture is nice. Few of the intended ground-floor shop units materialised, and the Naples street buzz is missing. It should be ideal for cycling, but the road is totally dominated by moving and parked cars. Nearer Salford Quays it gets worse as getting to the Bridgwater or Ship Canals requires braving an intimidating gyratory and then the towpaths are unnecessarily blocked by minor works.

Salford Quays itself is a negation of planning. That so much money has created something so ugly, poorly connected and cut off in its gated enclaves is dispiriting. The mean square outside the Lowry is little more than a turning circle, the tram stop is pig ugly, and the bland commercial buildings of MediaCity enclose a dank and draughty open space. Behind is neglected landscaping, a vast amount of car parking and an underused cycle hub (shed).
After more intimidating junctions on the way back it’s a relief to hand the bike back. We have a way to go before we have a Netherlands cycling experience. TfGM aims to increase the total number of journeys made by bike across the city region from 2% today to 10% by 2025, but the scale of the challenge and the tiny amounts of money spent so far (almost all from central Government grant-aid) make even this modest target seem faintly ridiculous. Cycling has an incredible list of benefits. It improves health, cuts pollution and noise, improves quality of life and creates jobs and other economic benefits too. All the best places in Europe to live and the most prosperous have a lot of cyclists. But all this is lost on the Councils of Greater Manchester as they designate land near Motorways for business, Green Belt for housing and build more and more roads for cars and scratch their heads and wonder why nobody wants to live in town centres anymore and why wealth creators give a wide berth. WAKE UP MANCHESTER!

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Death of Stockport Announced

11/16/2016

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Death of Stockport Announced by GMSF
The poverty of thought that passes for planning today was underlined with the recent Greater Manchester Strategic Framework (GMSF) launch. Having bizarrely invited landowners and developers to suggest sites (how is this ‘planning’? - I never got taught this at planning school), they simply put a red line around four bits of Green Belt to the south of Stockport, a town with a proud history, excellent transport links and plenty of spare urban land, but in desperate need of regeneration (see ‘Jones the Planner’ for a great description) and consigned Stockport itself to the dustbin.
High Lane is a typical Green Belt site, now earmarked for 4,000 houses. It is pleasant farmland that stops High Lane, Marple and Hazel Grove merging. The area relies on the A6 which is already congested all day with average speeds of 5-10mph. GMSF suggests that the much-loved Middlewood Way could be sacrificed to provide a tram-train link to Manchester, but this form of transport doesn’t currently exist anywhere in Britain. In any case, it would require a Transport and Works Act Order, cost over £400 million, and would take 15-20 years to build based on the experience of Metrolink (tram) schemes. By this time the volume house builders will be long gone.
Yes, we do need more, quality, well located and affordable housing. But we should look where there is already land or underused buildings next to good public transport services with spare capacity. The obvious place is Stockport centre which has a surprisingly interesting urban landscape but a centre like a swiss cheese. I wouldn’t live there now, but I probably would if we could create sustainable development based on European models.
Of course, GMSF did assume that some housing would be developed in town centres (1,500 in the case of Stockport). But the business model of volume house builders revolves around large new greenfield developments. If Green Belt sites like High Lane are released, these will be developed first, and the opportunity for real regeneration in Stockport (and other satellite towns that desperately need development like Ashton, Hyde, Oldham, etc., etc.,) will be lost for a generation. Forget about the 1,500, Stockport will be lucky to build 150.

So what to do? First we need a proper, objective urban capacity and design study, together with an assessment of what is needed to make towns liveable again. And then we need to do it, rather than take the lazy way out with the red pen by building on the Green Belt.
Britain used to lead the world in town planning, and people came from all over the world to see our garden cities, new towns and other wonders. But no more. Our leaders in Greater Manchester need to get on a cheap Ryanair flight to The Netherlands or Germany to see how it should be done. In the meantime it is left to local people to do the planning for the planners.

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Birmingham reborn

8/20/2016

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New Street, New Start they say. A big city saddled with the black hole of New Street station has spent £750 million on New Street and another £128 million to return trams to the streets for the first time in 62 years. So what does Brum look like now, and how does the transport function?
The standard image of Birmingham is big but boring; motorways, urban sprawl, industry, sixties concrete. Not in the top twenty UK places to visit, and that hurts particularly as there is a lot of great museums, architecture and spaces to visit. But Birmingham is changing. Concrete is crumbling, cars tamed, the permanent city-centre bus jam has been banished and several billion pounds on urban regeneration.
New Street is the main arrival point and was the weakest link with dingy platforms and a bare concrete concourse stuffed under an insipid shopping centre. So what does £750m buy you? The new soaring curvy atrium is definitely second-city, with plenty of space, and a ginormous Pret-a-Manger. But nothing has been spent on the platforms, still hidden in their hole and accessed through colour coded lounges that are neither coloured nor lounges. I don’t know about you, but I have some seats and a sofa in my lounge. And some colours too. And I can find my toilet, a task that was beyond me at New Street. And don’t even ask about left luggage – perhaps they could find some space under the stairs. On arrival there are no street maps, no local public transport information, and generally no-one around to help. I’m not sure which way to go, and only find the exit I want at the second attempt.
Finding the station on the way back is almost as difficult, unless you follow signs for the shopping centre. The old station was buried under a shopping centre but is now promoted to be part of the ‘new’ Grand Central shopping centre. Time to rename New Street as ‘Grand Central’?
What about the services? Pick a German city at random and find a unified suburban train network integrated with central tunnels. But Birmingham has unaccountably split theirs by diverting trains to Snow Hill, a decent walk away. The new trams link the stations, but wind at walking pace through precious city space and turn up apologetically at the side entrance to New Street. Plans for a new HS2 station will fragment the train network further. Surely a priority must be a proper cross city tunnel for trains and trams?
Of course every German city has integrated fares for all public transport too, but our expectations are so low I’m not surprised New Street has no sign of where to catch a bus or how I buy a ticket, or if I can buy one that allows me to use trams and trains too. As if to emphasise the lack of integration, I enter a ‘Travel Shop’ near New Street and ask for a public transport map. The staff look confused. Apparently they work for a bus company and they send me back to the station.
So we’ve made it outside, what to see? Birmingham has an impressive Town Hall, Art Gallery, etc., together with some opulent pubs, banks and shops which show how rich and important Victorian Birmingham was. But sixties carmageddon and concretopia (also the name of a surprisingly readable book) has eliminated most other evidence. Some nice old buildings survived around Gas Basin on the Worcester and Birmingham canal: the remnants have been used as a backdrop for regeneration and I head off there. The walk from New Street takes you through the bland, lumpen Mailbox (a former sorting office converted into upmarket shops) to the Cube (ditto). Gas Street Basin itself is actually quite small. And the quality of the new stuff is shocking. The Premier Inn is awful beyond belief, blank brick walls, privatised space, clumsy fire escape, looming like Mordor in Lord of the Rings. Even worse is the lumpen Crowne Plaza behind. Between this and the canal there are plans to squeeze another 1.2 million square feet of mixed office, flats, leisure, retail etc. The artists’ impressions look ominous and desperate. All around are weeds, litter, random car parking and underused buildings. It's clear that Birmingham still doesn’t really understand people.
Out in the Jewellery Quarter things look up. Despite a general air of decay, many of the buildings have character. At the centre is the slightly shabby neoclassical St Paul's church in a square of interesting buildings housing independent businesses. Organic growth has produced real regeneration and real local jobs. Walking back past Snow Hill, a solitary baroque terracotta archway with a Great Western Railway Crest stands defiant against the monstrous blank wall of a car park.
So what did I learn? New New Street looks nice, but the result of £1 billion is disappointing. How can you spend this much without touching the platforms or providing space for HS2? Or somewhere to sit? Big cities desperately need to think bigger and integrate their trains. And maybe integrate fares too. There are some good regeneration projects, but still too much reliance on ‘icons’. But the spirit of enterprise is there, pushing Birmingham to tear itself down and build itself up again. I just hope it lasts longer than the 1960s.

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In praise of Himalayan Balsam …

9/24/2015

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I come to praise Himalayan Balsam, not to bash it …
In a nature reserve near you, hardy work parties of wardens and volunteers will have ‘bashed’ the dreaded exotic invader Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera or HB) all summer. Introduced to Britain in 1839, it is our fastest growing annual plant with beautiful flowers and explosive seed pods loved by children. But according to Natural England and the Environment Agency it:

Is a highly invasive annual weed, which can reduce biological diversity by outcompeting native plants for space, light and nutrients
Restricts river access, leaves autumn river banks bare of supporting vegetation and prone to erosion and the dead plant material increases flood risk.
Attracts pollinators away from native species, reducing the genetic diversity of native species and fitness by reducing seed set.

But the charge sheet feels a bit hysterical. Can any plant be this bad? What is the evidence? Once you start to dig a bit, there’s not much. A few short term studies, one that looks at the effect on just a single native species, some that don’t really support the conclusions put about by our conservation bodies at all. Few seem to have been subjected to peer review, a scientific process that allows us to be fairly certain about the results. Indeed given the urgency of the calls to eradicate HB, not much at all. But what do the experts actually say?

A study by Hulme and Brenner[i] showed that more species are present if you remove Himalayan Balsam (HB), but noted ‘in open and frequently disturbed riparian vegetation, many of the species negatively influenced by Impatiens are widespread ruderal[1] species. Thus while several authors recommend its removal such action may only lead to a compensatory increase in the abundance of other non-native species and thus fail to achieve desired conservation goals.’ This doesn’t suggest that there is much effect on the sort of native plants that we might want to conserve. Tickner[ii] compared the competitive ability of nettle and Balsam; sometimes our native nettle loses out. But nettle only grows where there are a lot of nutrients – the sort of sites that have little diversity anyway.

Chittka and Schürkens[iii] suggested competition for pollinators might reduce the amount of viable seed set. But they only looked at the effects on Stachys palustris, which is pretty common anyway, for just one season. This is a long way from showing that in a real habitat HB affects the viability of even this one species which is of no real conservation interest, let alone other species. We know that HB has high-sugar nectar and flowers for a long time - Bee Keepers love it. Of course it might just support a larger bee population in the medium term leaving the same number of bees available to pollinate other flowers. And finally Tanner[iv] looked at the effect on invertebrates. The evidence was inconclusive - fertile ground for a follow-up study rather than hard conclusions.

I can’t find a scientific paper that looks at the alleged erosion-enhancing effects of HB; all the evidence seems to be anecdotal. HB often inhabits urban river banks where flows are unusually peaked (due to the higher run off because of impermeable surfaces), favouring the sort of erosion that HB is blamed for. It might of course be that HB is just good at colonising river banks that are already prone to erosion.

So there you have it. The studies are short-term and focus on the disturbed, urban and nutrient-rich habitats that HB favours rather than more important plant communities. None of the studies ‘prove’ that HB reduces biological diversity in the long or medium term, or that it is responsible for erosion, or for reducing genetic diversity. Of course, the scientists themselves are honest about pointing these issues out in their papers, and state that more research is needed. But these caveats are never reported in the campaign against HB.

That there is so little hard evidence that HB harms conservation is bad enough. Even worse than this, Wadsworth looked at control strategies and concluded that they are ‘rarely effective in the long term’. Now I’ve ‘bashed Balsam’ myself, enjoyed it, and even met some nice people while doing it. It's certainly true that HB gets in the way and takes up a lot of space. There may be a need to remove the plant for instance where it blocks a path. But in an age of austerity should we really be spending millions of hours and millions of pounds fighting an imaginary enemy?
[1] Scientific name for plants that tolerate disturbance. Examples include docks, dandelions and thistles.
[i] Hulme and Brenner 2006: Assessing the impact of Impatiens glandulifera on riparian habitats: partitioning diversity components following species removal (Journal of Applied Ecology 2006 43, 43–50)
[ii] Tickner et al 2001: Hydrology as an influence on invasion
[iii] Chittka & Schürkens 2001: Successful invasion of a floral market
[iv] Tanner et Al 2013: Impacts of an Invasive Non-Native Annual Weed, Impatiens glandulifera, on Above- and Below-Ground Invertebrate Communities in the United Kingdom

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Transport futures in Burnley

7/13/2015

While the big rail money is splashed on London and HS2, and Northern rail electrification is cancelled, what about Burnley? Robbed of direct trains to Manchester in the 1960s and industry in the 1980s, better transport links are now seen as essential.

Lancashire have quietly beavered away with their EU Citizens Rail project to provide a new hourly train service to Manchester appropriately from Manchester Road station, and have funded a new ticket office. Externally it is functional and a bit ugly; clearly not the ‘attractive and iconic gateway to the town’ promised in the brochure. And no sign of the promised ‘coffee cart’. But definitely an improvement on no building; at least you can wait in the dry. The open cycle racks and locked wheelie bin compound shows the comparative priority given to waste and cyclists. The forecourt is overdesigned and over-engineered - a lot of cash has gone into making life difficult for pedestrians in an unimaginative, 1980s way. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that a better job was possible for half the money.

There is no sign of a bus stop (apart from an old one on the otherwise untouched Blackburn platform), so it’s a walk into town. The diagrammatic map at the station is confusing and must have cost more than one of the good commercial versions now universal in London. There is the inevitable pedestrian-hostile roundabout. Then a nice canal-side development (visitor centre closed), and evidence of Burnley’s proud past with a lovely Victorian town hall and theatre. But opposite, the unpleasant 1960s Chaddesley House shows the extent of Burnley’s architectural and social decline. Occupied, but barely maintained by social services, at least there is a Wetherspoon’s a few doors down to cope with the fallout. In the middle distance are views of a vast Tesco Extra that has hollowed out the town centre. It seems only the football club has performed well in Burnley in the last couple of decades.

I take the new train. Every hour a 30 year old diesel takes a leisurely 53 minutes for less than 30 miles. The train dawdles and then stops and inches gingerly across the new single track ‘Todmorden Curve’. We pick up speed into Manchester, but driving is quicker most times of the day, and certainly cheaper if you are on your own - £12 return in the peak, or £10 if you can. If you want to continue your journey by Metrolink you will need a new ticket; by bus there is theoretically ‘plusbus’, but you have to buy it at the same time as the rail ticket and understand pages of confusing conditions. For instance, it claims to be valid throughout Greater Manchester, but the validity maps only show central Manchester. Very, very few people use Plusbus.

This is the Northern Powerhouse, or Northern Powercut as it has been dubbed now electrification plans are on hold. But what should we aspire to, what could we reasonably achieve and what should we settle for under the current circumstances?

I think we can agree that Lancashire have done their best, providing a new station building and rail service at a time when resources are difficult to find and spare diesel trains are scarce; they have brought in European funding, and perhaps more importantly expertise. But I think we can all agree that we can and should do better.

A German service between comparable towns in, say the Ruhr or in The Netherlands in the Raandstaat would have modern, airy stations served by up to six modern electric trains every hour. Bus and tram connections would be available at both ends and included in the ticket price and they would even wait for the train, but you might not need them as the train would probably continue in a tunnel under the city to your destination. Station would have ample cycle parking, there would be good cycle and walking maps, cycle hire and certainly and safe and convenient cycle routes.

Maybe we can’t have all this now, but Scotland (5 million people) has improved and electrified railways and even built the 30 mile new Borders Line. Compared to this, Greater Manchester and Lancashire (bit over 4 million) has done little apart from build Metrolink tram lines - which are fine, but not really a solution for longer journeys. There isn’t any integrated ticketing worth mentioning even though Manchester owns the tram network. Of course Scotland is not perfect – the Edinburgh tram problems show this, but with a devolved Government, at least they have a choice while the northwest has the odd scrap thrown by the Treasury. With the cancellation of Trans-Pennine electrification, perhaps 30 year-old trains and 30mph is the way forward for Burnley in the foreseeable future. I hope not.

Recent commissions

5/28/2015

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Current Blackfryers projects include planning and enforcement advice for a waste site in Lancashire, renewable energy in Chester, housing development in Wrexham, Rail franchising in Scotland and many more. Contact us for details

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New national planning rules. What do they mean?

Cardiff Blues

Another death - Northern transport cc

Northern Transport Summit

Cycling in circles - wake up Manchester

Death of Stockport Announced

Birmingham reborn

In praise of Himalayan Balsam …

Transport futures in Burnley

Recent commissions

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