Britain may invest more public money into transport infrastructure than most countries, but the high cost of building new trains, trams, and roads means we don’t actually get more (or better) transit infrastructure as a result.
Infrastructure cost expert Alon Levy notes that if Britain could build as cheaply as the Nordics, then for the same money as Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) London could also have Crossrails 2 through 5 and extend the Victoria, Bakerloo, and Metropolitan lines.55
Between 2015 and 2023, Britain invested on average £308 per person per year on road and rail infrastructure. This was £37 more than France and £57 more than Germany. However, Britain pays a 65% cost premium for infrastructure over France, Spain, Germany, and Italy. For every £1m spent on infrastructure in the latter four countries, Britain must spend £1.65m to get the same amount of rail or road.
When you adjust for Britain’s 65% cost premium over peer countries, Britain’s £308 per head becomes just £186. Britain goes from investing more than £37 more than France and £57 than Germany, to investing £85 and £65 less respectively.
Or put differently, if Britain’s cost-premium over European peers was eliminated, our £21bn of annual investment (average 2015-2023) in transport infrastructure would secure 65% more infrastructure per pound spent. Over the course of a Parliament, Britain would, in effect, have £41.5bn more of actual transport infrastructure for the amount it already spends. Merely halving Britain’s cost premium – British projects would still cost 32.5% more — would still unlock an additional £15.7bn worth of infrastructure over five years.
What could £41.5bn buy?
At European prices, Britain could buy an extra £41.5bn worth of transport infrastructure over a five year period without raising an additional penny in tax or increasing borrowing. This would be transformative.
For example, England is spending £27bn on its third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) over the next five years. Although a large sum, it represents a real terms (accounting for inflation) cut of around 20% from the previous Road Investment Strategy (RIS 2) budget and an even larger cut to spending on new roads and upgrades of England's motorway and A-road network (down to £4bn from £14bn in RIS 2, though only less than £9 billion was actually spent). If Britain's infrastructure costs fell to European levels, it would be possible to turn RIS 3 from a 20% real terms cut to a 10% real terms rise (£27bn to £37.5bn) entirely reversing the £10bn cut to spending on new roads and upgrades in England.
Cancelled projects such as the A1 Northumberland dualling (£500m)56 and the A47 Wansford to Sutton dualling (£100m)57 could be funded, along with long-delayed schemes like the A120 Braintree to A12 dualling (£1.3bn)58 — a key freight and commuter route connecting Stansted Airport to Harwich port that has been stuck in the pipeline for over a decade. Other potential schemes in England upgrades to the M1 between Doncaster and Darrington (£1.3 billion),59 the A303 between Amesbury and Berwick Downs (£2.35 billion),60 Junction 8 of the M27 (£50 million)61 and the A27 between Worthing and Lancing (£20 million)62 dualling the A358 from Taunton to Southfields (£328 million)63 and the Acle Straight (£400 million)64 and new roads such as the Princess Way scheme in Liverpool (£250 million)65 and the Arundel Bypass (£630 million).66 Some of this budget could be reallocated to the devolved administrations and could be used to pay for a Third Menai Crossing (£400m)67 connecting the island of Anglesey to mainland Wales and repair the Woodside Viaduct on the M8 in Glasgow.68 This would still leave over £3 billion for other road projects, which would be enough to turn 79 miles of A roads into dual carriageways or widen 151 miles of motorway.69 This surplus could be used to fund schemes proposed as part of the Roads Investment Strategy that have been cancelled.70
This would represent a major step-forward in road investment, but still leave £27bn to invest in the rest of the transport network.
One key area for investment would be rail electrification. Just 38% of Britain's railways are electrified. By contrast 62% of German railways, 61% of French railways, and 100% of Swiss railways are electrified. Railway electrification in Britain is also expensive by international standards.
For the last 50 years, Germany has electrified an average of around 200km of rail annually. By contrast Britain has followed a feast and famine approach – in more than half of the last 30 years, Britain didn't electrify a single mile of track.
To meet the rail industry's emission reductions target, Britain will need to electrify around 190 miles of track every year until 2050. Costs vary between projects – older lines are typically more expensive to electrify – but at current British costs averaging around £5m per mile, it would cost around £1bn per year to electrify enough rail to meet the rail industry's decarbonisation target. As it stands, Britain is set to electrify fewer than 30 miles of railway per year over the next five years. If that level were raised to 190 miles per year, then it would cost around £1bn per year (or £5bn over five years). This, plus the roads investment, still leaves £22bn left over to upgrade Britain’s transport network.
What could that remaining £22bn be spent on?
Some of our busiest (and most delayed) railways are already electrified, however they are constrained by other factors. For example, the Selhurst junction near East Croydon station is one of biggest rail bottlenecks in the country affecting 25 million passenger journeys each year. Too few tracks north of East Croydon mean that delays can have huge knock-on effects throughout the rail network. Services through central London (Blackfriars, City Thameslink, St Pancras) and out to Cambridge, Luton, and Bedford are all constrained by the Croydon bottleneck. The bottleneck also is holding up the expansion of Gatwick Airport as targets to increase the share of visitors via public transport are dependent on more capacity on the Brighton Main Line. A scheme to build two additional tracks north of East Croydon (and change other layouts) could unlock an extra 4-6 trains per hour at a cost of £2.9bn.
The Castlefield Corridor in Manchester is another major bottleneck. Local, regional and airport trains are all forced to share a two track corridor between Deansgate and Piccadilly in Manchester, with Platforms 13 and 14 at Piccadilly a major pinch point. When one train is delayed, the next train is often forced to wait behind. As a result, delays can cascade through the network. One option to fix this would be to build an underground ‘crossrail-style’ through-running line with a limited number of underground stations designed to take the strain off existing pinchpoints. There are proposals, put forward by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, for an even more expansive underground network but even a more modest scheme focused solely on the Castlefield bottleneck could still have huge benefits allowing more trains into (and through) Manchester and improving reliability. This wouldn’t be cheap – it would cost between £5bn and £10bn at British construction costs (depending on the number of stations and assumptions about tunneling.
The key barrier to both schemes are concerns around cost, but would be easily affordable if Britain’s cost premium fell to European levels.
Since the turn of the century, Europe has seen a tram renaissance. Twenty-eight French cities have built or expanded a tramway system in that time. Around sixty German cities now have trams. With just three exceptions, every French city with more than 150,000 residents has a light rail system or metro. By contrast, Bristol (population: 470,000) and Leeds (population: 810,000) are without a tram or light rail system. In fact, just seven British cities have a tram.
As noted in section two, tram networks in Britain are far more expensive to build than on the continent. Of the 10 most expensive projects (on a per mile basis) in Britain Remade's Tram Cost database, five are British. Even at current British costs of around £87m per mile, the remaining £13.1bn would be enough to build around 138 miles of tram. This could mean a 35 mile network for Leeds and West Yorkshire, a 22 mile tram for Bristol, an 18 mile tram for Cardiff, a 14 mile tram for Leicester, a 12 mile tram for Coventry, a 20 mile system linking Southampton and Portsmouth, and a 10 mile network for Plymouth — with enough left over to fund almost 20 miles of extensions to existing tram systems in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh or Nottingham. If Britain's rail and tram costs fell to European levels, the same money would go almost twice as far.
The above analysis is premised on the idea that if Britain's cost premium over European peers was eliminated entirely, existing transport spend could buy an additional £40bn worth of investment over five years. In reality, eliminating this cost premium is likely to require deep reform of planning and procurement policy. It may also take time with reforms reducing costs through learning-by-doing over time. However, even if the reforms were only able to reduce the UK's cost premium by a quarter – in other words, British projects would still cost 48.75% more than European peers – it would still allow us to get £7.1bn worth of additional infrastructure over a parliament without increasing spending. That would still be enough to electrify 190 miles of railway per year for five years, fix the Croydon bottleneck, fund cancelled road schemes like the A1 Northumberland dualling and the A120 Braintree to A12, and build a Third Menai Crossing.