awjreynolds

WECA TCR, what happened to our £544m?

The government recently announced the 2027-2032 Transport for City Region settlements with the West of England CA receiving £752m or £788 per head. Amazing right? Well…

Under the City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement WECA was awarded £540m or £566 per head. The average per head allocation for CRSTS was £384. WECA won 1.47 times the average. In fact it far exceeded any other CA.

Under TCR, WECA won £788 per head which sounds good until you know that the average per head allocation was £924. WECA won 0.85 times the average. In fact it is the lowest per head recipient out of all Mayoral Combined Authorities.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_NhOTcTY4bIa_a3JQ1lEBhSuc5UUgrygzr32Omo8EBc/edit?usp=sharing

If WECA TCR performance had been as good as its CRSTS performance, it would have been allocated £1,296m. We missed out on £544m.

Why?!!

We need to be honest here. WECA, under Dan Norris, was placed into special measures (still under probation) ‘WECA area missing out on millions amid rows’. Both Bristol (under Labour) and BaNES (under Lib Dems) have not executed well on large CRSTS corridor schemes.

The only jewel in the WECA crown is South Gloucestershire who have spades in the ground and are rapidly delivering their CRSTS major corridor programmes

What would you do?

The evidence in front of the Department For Transport is of a dysfunctional Mayoral Combined Authority and it is clear that WECA has been unable to deliver a five year £540m programme of work due, in my opinion, to extraordinary damaging political games.

In the five years Dan Norris was in charge of WECA, it went from being top of the league into relegation.

The DfT had not choice but to cut its TCR allocation for WECA. Well not so much cut but more a carry on as you are and let’s hope you get better at doing this:

WECATotal Settlement (£m)Funding2022-23 (£m)2023-24 (£m)2024-25 (£m)2025-26 (£m)2026-27 (£m)2027-28 (£m)2028-29 (£m)2029-30 (£m)2030-31 (£m)2031-32 (£m)
CRSTS541105109109109109
TCR75212121121136176185

Lessons

Lessons need to be learnt and one of the simplest is to introduce gating similar to TfL which uses it as part of Local Implementation Plan delivery. London Boroughs get allocated funding for schemes. At regular intervals TfL evaluates progress on those schemes and *withdraws* funding for some of schemes if the borough is underperforming and offers it to other boroughs to bid on who are exceeding delivery.

We can all blame Dan

Fingers will be pointed. Blame will be sought by political parties and irate citizens. It will all be placed on Dan’s shoulders…and mostly rightly so. Although I think this was locally exacerbated by BaNES not taking ownership of their CRSTS programme on day one.

WECA is under new leadership. Bristol is under new political leadership. BaNES transport is under new political leadership. S Glos is doing good as it is. It’s important that lessons are learnt quickly and we execute better.

What’s needed now

  • less blame and excuses with an acceptance we need to learn and get better at this;
  • a requirement for Unitary Authorities to take early ownership of the schemes being delivered on their turf;
  • stronger WECA support and oversight of UAs and the schemes they design;
  • much less paperwork, Outline Business Cases are ok (ish), Full Business Cases are absolute hell and have no value…except to consultants;
  • less tolerant of slippages (see gating);
  • and many many more spades in the ground.

Let’s get sh*t done.

Leave a comment