Welcome to our second panel. Please could I ask you each to introduce yourselves?

I am the director of transport and place at Stantec. The way of thinking about me, I think, is that I have been advising developers and providers of infrastructure—largely, although not solely, on the private sector side—over the last 40 years.

Hello, everybody. I am the trustee for policy and external affairs at the Institution of Civil Engineers. As my day job, I am about to start as the director of infrastructure at the Tees Valley Combined Authority.

I am professor of planning at the University of Cambridge. I am also a co-investigator of the DARe Hub, which is the research centre sponsored by UKRI and the Department for Transport, advising Government on transport decarbonisation and climate adaptation.

Excellent; thank you very much. In an ideal world, how can spatial planning support an integrated transport system? What wider benefits can be unlocked and which benefits are easiest to unlock?

I take myself back to 1994—very exciting days for those of us who were practitioners at the time—and the introduction of planning policy guidance note 13 on integrated transport planning and land use. We all thought that we were going to see radical change coming and helping us deliver integrated transport and land use, improved environmental and societal outcomes, and indeed better economic outcomes, many of which were described in the previous session. We have to turn our mind to why that has not happened and why it is that major development areas—those in Kent Thameside, for example—that were being planned during the early to mid-90s have ended up becoming fairly traditional, suburban, car-dependent, planning-led places in which people live, not the places where you might go to catch a bus or train or use your bike in the way that we thought might have happened. It may be better than some areas—it is close to Ebbsfleet International and all the rest of it—but the plans for that area were significant, substantial and ambitious, and yet there was a drag on the planning process that led to more traditional development forms happening on the ground. Some of those things are related culturally to the way in which transport and land use planning is done in the UK, but they also relate to a lack of engagement and explanation to communities about the benefits of changing the spatial planning system.

Did you mention Thamesmead?

No, this was Kent Thameside with Ebsfleet International and the surrounding 2,500 acres of land.

Would a contrast to that be Docklands? Is a development corporation a potential solution?

Yes, development corporations are certainly helpful in that they focus the skills and decision making that you need into one place, depending on how the development corporation and the way it is designed work. That can be helpful, but Docklands was also locationally more favourable.

I recognise that it is a slightly different geographic example.

On a practical level, infrastructure is a system of systems. When you isolate one part of that system, such as transport, from other parts of the system, such as spatial planning, you end up potentially missing out some benefits. You miss out why you are trying to do it and potentially—at the worst—put the wrong solution in the wrong place at the wrong time. That is why we have sometimes had large-scale housing developments that have not had the right level of connectivity or we have not had transport schemes that deliver health benefits or connect people to where they want to go, when they want to go there. It is seeing infrastructure as a system and understanding the why. The one thing that spatial planning probably does is lead us to ask that question: why? “Why there? What is the purpose? What are the outcomes that we are trying to get to?” From that, the right infrastructure solutions can come. We often start by thinking of it as a transport scheme—a bus scheme, a rail scheme—and going straight down to the solution, and that is where we end up digging ourselves into a bit of a hole.

On how spatial planning can support transport integration, the only point I want to make is about financing. Land use capture has been a very important mechanism for financing the infrastructure investment. I just want to give you a few figures to show the potential magnitude of impact. Nationwide, the community infrastructure levy, which is the current development tax, plus section 106 contributed a total of about £7 billion per year at 2018 price levels. If we look at the specific case of the Crossrail project in London, out of the £7 billion contribution from the GLA to the total cost, about £4 billion came from the business rate supplement and the rest came from the mayoral community infrastructure levy and section 106. This is a very important source of revenue to finance the changes that we expect, particularly for the purpose of transport integration, but somehow is currently missing in the evidence base published by the Department for Transport. On the wider benefits of transport integration, I would like to argue that integration is only the means; it is not the end. We need to be clearer about the purpose for which we want to integrate the transport. One particular benefit—again, I want to fill the gap in the existing literature and the evidence base—is how we can make active use of integrated transport services to influence people’s travel behaviour. For example, dynamic pricing: how can we tailor the cost of travel based on where you travel, who you travel with, and for what purposes? Once the transport service has been integrated, we will have a new policy instrument that can be used to change people’s behaviour, but that is not mentioned much in the existing documentation.

Li, I have a follow-up question on your point about incremental value capture and the Crossrail business rates model. Why do you think that model has not been adopted more widely in this country?

That is a very good question. Out of all the local authorities, there are a total of about 160 charging local authorities implementing the CIL. It is not clear from the literature why some local authorities choose not to adopt CIL. Currently it is done on a voluntary basis; this is something that we want to look at. Secondly, you can only capture land value when this value exists. Some people have mentioned that there is a significant difference in land value across different regions. If land value is very low, then there is nothing much you can capture. If you think about the administrative cost of collecting this tax, sometimes it is just not worth it. I do not think this can justify not thinking about development tax, or land value capture in general, as a useful source of money for it. London is a very exceptional case because of the very high land value but also because of the unique organisational and institutional setting, but I think it is a case that many devolved authorities should look at.

The current approach to land use planning already requires some consideration of transport. What do you think could be improved?

Again, I want to focus on just one thing, which is co-ordination between land use and transport planning. You are absolutely right that it is not fair to criticise land use planners and transport planners for not trying to work together, but in the current approach to co-ordinating these two sectors, so much effort has been put into co-ordinating along the spatial dimension—basically, trying to match the location of new housing developments with the provision of essential infrastructure—while temporal co-ordination is less effective. At the project or site level, this is about when the housing will be built or delivered in relation to when the social and economic infrastructure will be delivered. At the strategic level, this is about, for example, the different timings of various local plans. In the Cambridge context, for example, when would the next transport strategy be in relation to the update of the local plan? I welcome the new initiative—the spatial development strategy—but again, thinking about the temporal co-ordination between the spatial development strategy and the various plans, I do not really know how this would pan out. To answer your question, where we can do better is perhaps to focus more on the temporal co-ordination in addition to the spatial co-ordination.

I will offer you two examples. One is probably in skills and one is in funding. On the skills issue, again, a lot of the time in transport planning we leap to the solution—it is a bus scheme or an active travel scheme—but actually, it is about place shaping. This goes back to the why—why we are doing this. At the land use planning level, we need to keep it at place shaping rather than going very quickly into the solutions. It is about creating a place where people want to live their daily lives. In transport planning skills, we sometimes do not have that. We design bus or cycle lanes, but we do not do a great deal when it comes to understanding and listening to what people want and how transport benefits their daily lives. It is that skill of listening to what people want and understanding place shaping. The second issue is the funding bit. We are moving—we will probably come on to this a bit later—to longer-term funding settlements, but traditionally, particularly for many local authorities, transport funding has come in annual cycles. When you are trying to shape a place, that can be a 10-year vision or cycle. When you are trying to align something that is long term with funding that is very short term and make decisions, sometimes it is out of kilter, or you go back to thinking about the solution without thinking about the big picture and the system. We have to understand the skills around place shaping and have that proper debate around place shaping. A lot of the work Keith did talks about that, but the funding alignment and that guiding mind that brings the funding and the ethos together is quite important.

On place shaping, I completely agree. Rather than repeat that, I will just add a couple of things. First, transport is not only about the transport service; it is about the place that you are starting from and the place that you are going to. Very often we talk about transport as if it is unrelated to those things and we do not see the opportunity of funding land uses—particularly advance-funding local shops and services—as part of your transport contribution. In terms of place shaping, we need to start thinking much more broadly about how we create a place right from the start that avoids the need for people to get into their car or indeed spend money on other transport services and enables them to get there relatively easily. That aspect of place shaping is quite important. At the end of the last panel there was a question about vision-led and the importance of that in the NPPF. I suspect we might talk about this a bit later but it is very important that we have moved towards vision-led planning. It has to be done on the basis of what a place is, where people come from who are living there, where they need to go from there, and then provide the systems that enable them to do that. Largely those are going to be at the top of our hierarchy of walking, cycling, public transport and mobility services. Yet when push comes to shove, how often is it that those things are not prioritised? We heard earlier that cycleways can be badly planned and often disconnected, and that buses do not get started early enough, but boy oh boy, the road will have been delivered. That is just the wrong way round. We are thinking about this the wrong way round and it is culturally the wrong way round. In terms of co-ordinating land use and transport, that is another area that we need to get our head around.

I want to look a little more specifically at how each individual partner can work together—I am thinking about local authorities, transport providers and developers—to deliver well-integrated transport that serves the needs of users and communities. What are some levers that could be used? I am thinking particularly of those communities where new developments are built on the edge of towns or cities or you have expansion into rural communities—the urban fringe, in particular. We hear a lot about the big combined authorities or the big mayoral authorities. They have a lot of joined-up thinking together. If you are not one of those communities, how do you deliver for the people who are living in an area that does not yet have some devolved organisations?

In my current job, I am involved in the St Cuthbert’s garden village scheme on the outskirts of Carlisle. I am working with the council, which is not a combined authority yet but soon will be, Homes England and a number of the infrastructure providers. An infrastructure plan has been developed that supports that build-out, and that infrastructure plan started from the point of view of what the existing infrastructure opportunities are. As you are building out that site, what could you do now? What is available now? What can you build on? What is that place-shaping idea that you want to be? There has been from the very start an overall master plan, but when you move a master plan into delivery, it is a very different type of thing. It brings all the people with the funding and the infrastructure providers into one place, and now the council is looking to develop a special purpose vehicle to deliver that and keep it going. We talked before about mayoral development orders, local development orders, development corporations; there is a whole range of things we can do. It is about getting all the right people in the right room and taking forward that vision of what you are trying to do.

You talk about a garden village you are developing. I have a new town in my constituency that is in one district council but is partly in a city council and is also served by the county council when it comes to the strategic road network. The complaint that comes through most frequently is that the transport piece was not thought about. Often you master plan and then it is 10 years before people start delivering, by which point other road schemes might have come in. That is a very live situation that I have at the moment. Three road schemes are all happening at the same time, which are all very near each other and all have a direct impact and cause and effect. How do we change that and use the national planning policy framework but also the integrated national transport strategy to make sure that even those two pieces are joined up, and that it is about what communities want? What they do not want is for a master plan to be developed without their realising it and then, 10 years later, implemented, by which point it is too late for them to have their say.

To answer that question directly, one opportunity is spatial development strategies, because that sort of example would be identified within a spatial development strategy as a core growth zone. We need to push further on things such as the NPPF about how you bring people together and take a lead. The example in Cumbria that I gave involved Cumbria county council and Carlisle city council at the time, and it was Cumbria that took the lead, but it involved Carlisle in those discussions. It is that bit of leadership—one of those organisations or tiers of governance taking a lead but ensuring that the others are in place.

If we think about the 30 years that we have been trying to do integrated transport and land use planning, and the amount of suburban housing that has been developed, it is an awful lot of people living in an awful lot of places that are captive to their cars. This is no small thing; the scale of the issue accumulates. You asked about levers in terms of collaboration and to help to accelerate change. One is better processes for how we engage with our communities. If there is a new suburban development, urban extension, garden town or garden city, the people who already live there host that place and want to benefit from it; they do not want to see it as something that is going to create more difficulties and congestion for them. How do we better understand what their requirements are? One reason I was asked to come here is that towards the end of my practitioner period, I did a piece of research called “Bridging the Gap”, which looked at a development place in Bury with the local authority, the developers and the local community. Something that particularly struck me was the propensity to go to the local community and say, “We are going to provide you with better transport and these connections and these connections, and you’re going to really like them,” and they went, “No, not really, and it doesn’t actually work for me.” If you turned the question around completely, and went and asked them, “How can we improve the situation in a way that meets your needs?”, you would get a much more positive engagement and much more immediacy in terms of developing ideas about what the community actually needs, around which you can build your plan. This is really important in terms of how we do vision-led planning, because we are telling, not asking. That is a great lever all the way through decision making, both for how the assessments are done in the technical and planning teams and for how decisions are taken by the planning committees.

I will put my final question to Li, given his expertise in planning. The new town of Sherford in my constituency was created in vision before I was living back in Devon. I was doing my career in London at the time, so I do not even remember what happened then, but ultimately it is a really good example of a master plan about which, by the time it is delivered, people forget what they said and thought. Things also move on. How do we deal with the need for a crystal ball in master planning and make sure that integration actually delivers for people? It does not have to be for you, Li, sorry—that was a wry smile. Anybody can answer. You are all reflecting, effectively, the impossibility of knowing what might happen, but it also sounds like you think there are some things that we could do. How do we create an accurate crystal ball that delivers at the point when building and construction takes place?

Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Planners cannot predict the future. With a master plan or even for local plans with a time horizon of 15 years, it is very hard to predict what will happen. To answer your question, there is a fundamental challenge of trying to embed too many things in the master plan or local plan to a level that we mix very strategic considerations with very specific site allocation. I do not think that is constructive, and that exposes the plan to too much uncertainty ahead. For new towns specifically, we need to take some very strategic considerations—particularly those enabling conditions—separately and make a strong case that this needs to happen before the lower-level plan can be executed. This level of separation is very important. If you conflate everything, you forget about the interdependencies of all these measures and lose sight of the big picture.

You are effectively saying that if you start saying 10 years out, “You need a park and ride here, a doctor’s surgery on this particular piece of land and two-bedroom flats here,” you almost bind your arms from being able to deliver what people might want in 10 years’ time, are you not? In the meantime, you have told people, “This is what it is going to look like,” and then they feel let down when it does not work out.

It is a very static way of painting the vision of it and sometimes that can be quite misleading. It may sound quite intuitive but in terms of master planning, particularly over a very long time horizon, we need to separate the different priorities and compartmentalise them so that we can better co-ordinate them, perhaps at a later stage. If you mix them all together from the very first, then it is hard to monitor the progress.

A lot of that makes enormous sense. It is very difficult. Part of vision-led planning is not to try to land on only one outcome, because we do not know the future. We plan for alternative scenarios or things that are likely to happen and then plot a path for those things that we can do that help to deliver us to the most likely outcome and the one that we actually want to happen. Creating that desirable path through a set of scenarios is what vision-led planning really should be about. It is not fixed. It is very hard, and it needs a really rigorous process of monitoring and review in place so that you are not forgetting at every step what it was that you said you were going to do along the way, but you are monitoring whether you are achieving those outcomes and if you need to change what you have to do.

The why does not change, but the how and the when might—and, again, the why is the bit we need to communicate better as well. We will need good healthcare. When we start off, we might think that is a dedicated GP surgery, but actually it might then be a drop-in centre in a local community centre. You still need the facilities. The why does not change, but how and when will alter over time as it is delivered.

I am thinking back to my time as shadow Planning Minister. Unless the primary school was put in place and staffed from the outset, the early arrivers on the estate and the new community went to the existing school and there were cost implications. I am thinking the same for buses serving that community when it starts off as a small community. Is there any funding to support early start-up for public services, in your experience?

It is becoming more so. In the St Cuthbert’s garden village example, there was an existing school on the outskirts that would need to be expanded, but now we are talking about putting it inside the garden village area—within the urban centre—because that will give footfall and growth to the urban centre and give an anchor, if you like, for that movement to start off with. The problem is that, in terms of the presumption of free schools and how schools are implemented these days, there are other elements of policy that do not fit with what we are trying to do, so you come up against that particular barrier.

In a way that is a good example. As for implementing new NHS GP surgeries, I have never seen a new one in our part of west London, despite numerous planning conditions.

We go to infrastructure as a system of people’s lives. Those lives are touched by numerous Government Departments that have their own particular policies and agendas and sometimes frustrate what we are trying to do as the outcome. It is not just Transport; a number of Government Departments can do that.

There is one other source of funding to consider, and that is section 106, in relation not necessarily to public services, but to other community services. There is a technical issue, though, which is that you do not know how long that funding might be needed, and open-ended funding through section 106 is not possible. Figuring your way through all that can be done but it is complicated.

If I may, what you end up with is a section 106 allocation put into the master plan. I have a road in my constituency where they wanted to stop traffic going through a conservation area: 10 years ago, they said, “Let’s stick a bollard in,” but 10 years hence, “Oh, actually, that’s not going to work. We’ll do a stopping-up order.” All hell has broken loose, by which point the money has maybe doubled in value and they only have about 50 grand to deal with the problem, but nobody can quite see what is going to happen 10 years down the road and I have to deal with it.

I think we all have examples.

The Government are due soon—I am sure you are eagerly awaiting it—to publish their integrated national transport strategy. Could you each give a personal wish list of one or maybe two things that you hope to see in it to improve how spatial and transport planning interact?

Touching on financing and land value capture, I hope that the strategy will mention how aspirations at the national level, but also at local level, can be properly financed. In relation to the new town developments that I understand are a primary policy objective of the current Government, how can those new developments capture more from the developers, particularly if they are private, to enable the experiment of integrated transport at local scale?

I will offer you three observations. First, I go back to the point that it has to start with the fact that transport is part of an infrastructure system, and that system is about the outcomes that we are trying to get to. The second thing then is the role of national capability and particularly combined authorities, because that is where you probably have the biggest opportunity to make this live and make the link between land use planning, transport and all the things we want to happen effectively. Encouraging that is important. The third thing, going right down to the local level, is that even though it is an integrated national transport strategy, when we talk about joined-up journeys—that is what we are here to do today—a lot of the time those journeys start with a decision taken at the very base level, at home. We like to talk about big things, but often some of the biggest differences can be made with very small things, such as how you encourage people to make that first journey. I will give you a personal example. When I was in Norfolk last October half-term, a number of times I took the bus from East Runton to Sheringham and walked back. It was really good; we did it two or three times to go for walks with the dog and it was brilliant. We drove there, but we almost left the car for the whole week. The people we were renting from gave us the information about that bus service when we arrived, and we thought, “Oh, this is really good, we’ll use this.” Had we not had that information, would we have used it? Sometimes that very small, local thing can make all the difference. While we talk about integrating the national transport strategy, a lot of the time that decision making at local level can affect behavioural change.

I have two things to say. The first is about vision at the regional level. I worked with Lucy from the previous panel on some scenarios work for Transport for the North, when she was there. The end result of that was quite a theoretical set of scenarios, which then informed the way in which modelling for Transport for the North would have worked. What we need is something a little more rustic, place-based and people-focused that begins to understand what kind of integrated transport and land-use systems we need depending on what places we have, and how it varies between Norwich and Sheringham, between Didcot and Swindon, and indeed between the suburban and central areas of those places. I have had the misfortune of working with two local authorities, one of which was promoting a mass transit scheme in order to deliver benefits to all its development sites and its city centre, and it needed to go through another local authority’s patch. They were in court against each other, because one wanted it and the other one did not. Trying to avoid those kinds of situations is really important. Having that regional-level vision and hierarchical system into which local planning can hook itself is really important. Secondly, we need to anticipate more radical change. We have largely been talking about walking, cycling and public transport as part of our integrated journey, and indeed car-accessing those things, all of which is good. But in 20 to 25 years’ time, what sort of scenarios might we be anticipating and what are the things that we should be doing now in order to make the most desirable of those happen? It really is something that the integrated national transport strategy should start looking at and helping the rest of us come to some more informed views about.

As has been touched on, the Government have already made changes through other Departments on transport and planning policy, in particular through the national planning policy framework. Do you think the NPPF is effective in supporting the integration of transport and planning?

It is an improvement. The development planning policies—DP1 and DP3, for example—talk about all the right things in a way that is encouraging us to think about place making and the role of transport within it, which is good. The transport policies promote vision-led planning, and encourage parking to be set in accordance with the vision, which is code for not always needing to provide maximum parking if you have been able to supply alternatives that operate as conveniently as the car might have done. There are some really good things in the NPPF. My issue is that we have had supportive policy for a long time and the problems about change are not solely about policy; they are about culture and decision making and politics and communities, and an expectation that the car is the way in which we move around and not really understanding the impacts or the costs that that has on society. While the NPPF is moving policy forward in a positive way, we still have a lot of work to do on the other, softer issues.

Very briefly, I agree with Keith. It has probably not done so in the past but it is definitely improving. We would really welcome the spatial development strategies; as I said, that is where we can really make a difference at the more combined authority level. The clue is in the last word of the title; it is a framework. It should reference the 10-year infrastructure strategy and all the other things that are going on. It does not need to be all things to all people; it just needs to make sure that we can bring in all the things that make it joined up. Going back to a point that I made before, I am still not sure that at that local, practical level it forces us to look in a personal way at what an individual needs from a joined-up journey.

I want to comment on a specific change in the NPPF, which is about densification through transit-oriented development—basically, introducing minimum density thresholds for well-connected places, mostly around railway stations. There is a major knowledge gap in terms of the relationship between densification and sustainable travel. This has been acknowledged by the Department for Transport’s own publications. The existing evidence on the positive correlation between density and sustainable travel is mostly based on cross-sectional evidence—basically, if you compare across cities, you find that denser places somehow have more sustainable travel—but to the best of my knowledge, there is no conclusive evidence in the UK that, as one place gets denser, travel behaviour becomes more sustainable. Densification, particularly through TOD—transit-oriented development—is a very good starting point for talking about transport integration, but it is far from a sufficient condition for the integration of transport services. This is simply because, for example, it is not residential density alone that determines the viability of public transport. Think about the case in London. It is the employment density; it is the concentration of economic activities that underpins the viability of public transport, despite the fact that across very large labour catchment areas the residents are spatially distributed actually quite sparsely. If we want to better connect changes of the spatial planning policy, particularly around TOD, and transport integration, we probably should shift the focus slightly from residential density to employment density and thinking about the future growth of jobs. There is a tendency for jobs to be decentralised into suburban or peri-urban areas. That does not help with the goal of integrated transport.

You said in your written evidence that there is perhaps an imbalance between the focus on densification and planning of amenities and wider services. One issue I found in my area, which is a city constituency that opens into a largely rural county area, is that the railway stations that would be affected by this policy are just beyond the area of urban development. Cross-local authority planning issues are already a sticky and difficult area. The NPPF defines the immediate area for an assumption of development as within reasonable walking distance. I have not been able to find a definition of what reasonable walking distance is. Do you think that the documents and guidance that have been published so far are precise enough to make this policy work in practice?

I think it can be improved, but I am wary that introducing another numerical criterion for selecting the site would be very helpful, particularly given the heterogeneity that we observe across the regions. What would be really useful is that, in addition to considering minimum density thresholds for the new towns around railway stations, we do destination analysis and think about where people might need to travel to, particularly focusing on employment, education and amenities. We should look at the existing most share of those locations—not the residential location but the destination and how people travel to those locations—and then develop specific sustainable travel goals based on these key destinations. We need to link the trip origin and trip end when thinking about integrated transport, rather than just focusing on the residential end alone.

Guidance has been produced on vision-led transport planning by all sorts of different people. Oxfordshire has recently launched its guidance. Kent has its guidance. There has been a new professional association put together for people who are involved in the assessment of developments from a transport planning perspective. There is a lot of focus on this, but it is all very disconnected and not necessarily consistent, and it is not really integrated with the land use planning aspects and some of the decisions that need to be made about density versus place making versus transport mobility. Policy has permitted this way of decision making for some time, and it is getting better. What is holding it back is practice, and guidance on how we do this, coming from at least one place where we can all understand that there is one way of connecting this across the country, would be extremely useful.

The responsibility for this area is split across different Government Departments. Keith, you talked about local authorities, so this is perhaps for the other panellists: do you think the central Government Departments are integrated enough in their decision making around integrated transport?

No. I have given evidence to the Committee on another inquiry that straightaway we go into mode. Even the Department for Transport goes straight into mode, whether it is road, rail or active travel. A lot of the time people’s everyday journeys involve multiple modes, multiple decisions, and multiple reasons, whether that be health, education, employment or leisure. The way the Government is set up, with siloed Departments and then silos within Departments in terms of mode, does not reflect what people are trying to do with their journey. That automatically gives you a bit of a conflict between how the money and the policy arrive and what people are trying to do. That is why I was saying that that is where the opportunity is much more at the mayoral combined authority and strategic authority level to join that back up a little, and where integrated settlements and spatial development strategies will start to help. Taking Rebecca’s example of the new community in Devon, if a single authority can take the lead and bring people together with the funding, the powers and the convening, in one place, that will start to help. But the short answer is no.

How should we measure and put a value on transport integration? Can you give a couple of practical examples of what we are already measuring that makes sense, and what we should be measuring that would be helpful?

I made the point earlier that integration is the means and not the end. To evaluate the effectiveness of the policy you should first specify what you want to achieve. This is particularly relevant to an integrated transport strategy because it can only achieve so many things. If you look at the very wide range of potential benefits, it is not realistic to achieve them all in the short term. In terms of the selection of measurement, it really depends on what you want to achieve in the next three or five years. If we are only focused on transport outcomes—

Let us assume I want to achieve transport integration. What should I be measuring?

It depends on what that means.

Yes, you can talk about individual level, site level, cross-boundary collaboration between local authorities, or national level. To answer your question, two key mainstream measurements will be the public transport ridership: multi-modal transit and the mode share. They are usually measured by distance travelled, not by the number of trips, because that is more cogent to transport decarbonisation and resilience. I want to point out one nuance associated with all these measures. For example, if we talk about integrated transport, research suggests that within the various public transport modes, when systems are highly integrated you may see micromobility substituting for public transport and active travel. It may be observed within the umbrella of public transport modes: some modes will increase and some modes will decrease. I do not think that is a problem. I do not think that is a failure. We should actually look at the strategic level. Another thing is about the concept of derived or induced demand. At a very high level, reducing the cost or friction of travel will generate additional travel. Additional travel itself is not necessarily a problem, because if you look at the wider impact of mobility on economic growth, we travel faster so we become richer. But we need to make sure that this potential induced demand is met by sustainable modes. When we interpret all these figures, we need to have a more nuanced approach.

We tend to default to what we know best, which is a recurring theme here: we tend to measure outputs at the moment. Even in the new outcomes framework set out by the Department, a lot of them are outputs. As was said in the previous panel, they are things like length of bus lane and length of active travel. That means you lose the why. The Chair said it depends on what you mean by measuring transport integration. Why do you want to measure transport integration? If you say, “Because transport integration makes a journey easier for somebody to get to a hospital or to get about their daily life,” that is great; let us measure the perception of ease of that journey. Have we have made that journey easier? Have we made it better for somebody to do it? If we are trying to get better transport integration to make lives healthier, for example, we can look at health impacts in that particular local area. That is the outcome we are trying to get to. The difficulty is—we go back to this recurring theme—that it is a transport scheme, so we look for transport outcomes and transport outputs and transport benefits, but it is actually about lifestyle or wider achievements. You spoke about this in the previous session. It is much more behavioural impacts and behavioural change that we need to try to get to in order to understand whether we have achieved what we are trying to achieve with this.

On a slightly different tack, travel plans, environmental management plans and other plans are required for major development. There is very good—although quite long—guidance about travel plans written by Addison & Associates on behalf of the Department in 2010; it is quite long in the tooth now. It said that a travel plan is not worth the paper it is written on unless you monitor it and you monitor the outcomes and know whether the interventions you are using in your travel plan are succeeding. I know of one travel plan, of all the many that I have been involved with, that has ever been monitored and evaluated on a regular basis for major development. There is no system or money for that to happen so how on earth do we expect to understand what works and what does not work? One of the big things we could be doing is looking at an outcomes-based travel plan by mode and by what school people choose, which medical facilities people go to, and what decisions they are making. Those sorts of things could be part of a travel plan monitoring package that could be funded through development funding and set with the local authority, but it has not happened.

It shocked me as a London planning committee member for many years that PTAL scores—public transport accessibility level scores—which we have taken for granted in London for many years, are only just being rolled out across the country. That is a surprise. Something that struck us during our buses connecting communities inquiry, particularly looking at peri-urban and rural buses, was that one of the local authority witnesses talked about the fear that one of the reasons their country town centres were declining was the withdrawal and removal of bus services. Has anybody done any modelling or academic research on the link between public transport and economic sustainability away from the big cities?

Not that I can think of.

Not that I can think of.

I have not done any research myself, but I am happy to share a few relevant findings from the literature. Buses, and public transport in general, also serve a social function for the rural community. There is research showing that rural residents take the bus because they make use of that space to meet people. They get on a bus and do circles, because they can meet people from different villages. There is evidence showing the reduction of bus ridership and the decline of the high streets, particularly in rural towns, but it is not causal. The social functions of public transport should also be considered. This relates to the earlier question on measurement: should we include this, or should we monetise this in the existing framework?

That goes to the heart of something that Keith said. Sometimes we do not measure the right outcomes that we are trying to get to, such as when it comes to decisions about withdrawing a service. A lot of the time those will be made on a financial basis, and the impacts and outcomes in terms of high streets or the social aspect might be six or 12 months down the line. The idea of how we understand what infrastructure we provide or do not provide for people is something we do not really get. The institution is trying to do a piece of research later this year on understanding how people respond to infrastructure and people’s infrastructure needs, because we do not routinely evaluate that in the schemes we do. We evaluate how many people are on the bus or how many people have used the active travel lane but we do not evaluate the impact that has on somebody’s life.

I apologise that people are leaving; you will appreciate that people have to be in other places at the same time in this place, but the three of us are at the core of it. Where should we look for good examples of alignment between transport and planning that has already been achieved? If your examples are international, what features can easily be translated into the UK space?

I will just offer Vauban in Freiburg as somewhere to look.

Always Freiburg. Can we learn from Freiburg?

The reason I mention the obvious is that Vauban started life using funds generated from renewable energy projects to fund a tram into the city. Its vision was that people would not need to use the car to go to the city and people would not need to park their car outside their house. They could have a car park to bundle their car in and could come into the development for 20 minutes if they wanted to deliver their supermarket shopping. But their vision was to have a lovely place to be in. It is quite high-density on the edge of the city, but it feels like a lovely place to be. They did it by putting the most important thing of the vision right at the centre of what it was that they were going to do and doing it first.

And this was a new suburb on the edge of Freiburg.

Yes.

In terms of some of the integration stuff that we have been talking about, I think of places that market one network. London has done that quite effectively. The Swiss model is another example of that level of integration. I have a very personal example: I remember getting the ferry over to the far side of Sydney harbour. The bus that takes you onward waits for the ferry. If the ferry is a little late, the bus waits to connect and meet you. Those little practical examples make a heck of a difference in people’s lives in terms of a proper joined-up journey.

I want to touch on Switzerland, not least because I am doing a visiting professorship at ETH Zürich at the moment. On a technical level, it is not only the integration of the multiple modes, including the shared modes, that is impressive, but the variety of travel cards and passes available through the app. It basically tailors the fare to the purpose, who you travel with, and where you travel. They make use of those different subscription models to influence how people travel. That is something that we should also look at. In terms of the strategic level co-ordination between land use and transport, Switzerland is a highly decentralised country, as you all know, so I am not necessarily advocating that model here. But the land use and transport integration is done at four different levels in Switzerland. At the federal level, it has the sectoral plan, which includes, for example, nature, landscape, transport and energy; it has the cantonal plan; it has the regional plan, which is the combination of different municipalities; and it has the communal plans. Bear in mind that in Switzerland there are 26 cantons but over 2,000 municipalities, so cross-boundary collaboration is probably even more challenging in that context. Interestingly, it separates the land use plan from the structural plan at the lowest three levels: cantonal, regional and communal. It then basically does land use and transport integration at three levels and cross-levels. I do not think I can say that is the ideal model, but one particular benefit of doing it in that way is that it can decompose and compartmentalise the complexity. There is a common misperception that if land use and transport are integrated, we need to produce a monstrous plan that co-ordinates these two sectors across all spatial scales and local authorities. Thinking about the consultation or deliberation process behind this, that is virtually impossible to achieve. A feasible approach is to do this at different spatial levels. To give you an indication of how it manages this, at the cantonal level, the scale of the maps is 1:50,000; at the lower regional level, it is 1:20,000; and at the communal level, it is 1:5,000. It is only at the lowest level that they introduce the specific parcel-level zoning requirements. This is how they compartmentalise all the complexities around managing local impact at the local level.

The other difference with Switzerland is it seems to have a cultural assumption that the car is not king.

It was the case in the ’60s, though.

That is true. It is similar in terms of active travel and the Netherlands example as well. What do you think should be the Government’s No. 1 priority to deliver integrated transport in a way that aligns with spatial planning and meets the needs of communities?

There needs to be a refocusing of investment from highway infrastructure designed to create capacity for more car movement towards a more integrated set of services that can be developed to create an integrated and well-connected system of movement. It will still need people travelling on roads; I am not anti-car, but there is plenty of good evidence that suggests that if you provide the alternatives to the level that they are sufficiently convenient then people will use those and car use may go down.

And at a price and accessibility—

And price and ticketing and all the other things. This is a bit of a cultural shift away from big pieces of kit to open into stuff that works for local people.

Given the job I am about to move into this is probably an unsurprising answer, but we need to enable and empower mayoral strategic authorities to properly deliver this, because that is where it happens in practice. We will go back to the Green Book: it has moved significantly towards enabling us to properly evaluate infrastructure in its wider sense. As Lucy said earlier, when that meets the reality of an assessment, we need to ensure that the ethos of what the new Green Book says happens in reality, because that is the only way we will get the right infrastructure in the right place at the right time.

We heard very much from the last panel that strategic powers were going to mayoral strategic authorities—as they now are—but that they are not delivery bodies. Do you think that is an issue? Obviously, you could have mayoral development corporations tagged on, but do we need to get delivery powers at a regional level to match the strategic plan at a regional level?

Not necessarily if the mayoral strategic authorities are empowered to convene and move forward. Sometimes it is better to try to do it by consensus, which is where the spatial development strategies will come into their own. It is actually making everybody buy into one core, broad, high-level plan. Whether that would happen by osmosis, and whether that would be the convening power, may depend on certain personalities in those mayoral strategic authorities.

Is there a danger that you just end up with the lowest common denominator?

There could be, but mayors have some strategic planning powers coming. Sometimes it may well be that convening and consensus moving forward might be the best way to start, rather than imposing something on people.

The central Government Departments and their arm’s length bodies should take the lead in setting up the legal framework for data sharing across different transport operators and asset owners and create digital infrastructure; it is most effective if it is done at national level. To complement that and to align the integrated transport strategy with the housing targets, in 2008 the Department for Transport published guidance, “Building Sustainable Travel into New Developments: A Menu of Options for Growth Points and Eco-towns,” which, with hindsight, was very comprehensive and very far-sighted, and I suggest that the Committee and the Government revisit it and potentially update it. It provides really practical, actionable insights on how integrated public transport can be implemented in the new towns.

It is good to be reminded of that—thank you. Thank you all for your evidence and the time you have taken to prepare. If there is anything you would like to add, please write in. The evidence we have heard this morning from both our panels has been really helpful. We will reflect on the evidence we have received and any we are still to get as we continue our work on this inquiry. That concludes today’s meeting.