A friend travelling from London to Italy this summer thought she would do the decent thing and take her new electric Renault. It was the journey from hell. Charging points not working. Access codes inoperable and often indecipherable. A maze of different rates and operators. Oh, and all the while, rows of inaccessible Tesla fast-charging points in French service stations, which you need a gold-plated Tesla to be allowed to use.
The low point was getting trapped in an underground carpark late at night where the advertised charging point was out of action and you needed small coins which she didn’t have in order to escape with the car and its near-dead battery. I thought all this was being sorted. Eleven years ago, when I had some responsibility for these things as transport secretary, we started creating a national electric car charging infrastructure, but it hasn’t advanced much, despite all the COP26 rhetoric. Unless, it seems, you are a customer of Elon Musk.
Nothing else seems to have advanced much either. In 2010 I published the plan for HS2 to give Britain a long overdue high speed rail network, linking most of its major cities, to match those of Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, China and Taiwan. Eleven years later, construction has only just started on the first 100 miles from London to Birmingham, and the proposed eastern stretch from Birmingham to Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and York—vital to the social and economic future of the whole north and east of England, as well as the connectivity of England and Scotland—has been indefinitely delayed by a government whose public mantras are (cue laughter) “levelling up” and “strengthening the union.”
It is the same inaction on the vital imperative to reverse the worst of the Beeching rail closures, which half a century ago left a string of sizeable towns without a rail connection, sentencing most of them to long-term decline and depopulation.
Apart from some good work by the super-dynamic mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street in reopening suburban lines and stations in his region, the only major reverse-Beeching project underway is the reinstatement of the Oxford to Cambridge line. This was one of the most absurdly damaging of the 1960s closures, as the line served Milton Keynes just as it was being turned into England’s largest new town. This too started more than a decade ago and is still far from completion.
While most of the Johnson story is one of drift, there is also the occasional outright reversal of my infrastructure strategy. For example, he is bizarrely pressing ahead with the environmentally and archaeologically damaging Stonehenge road tunnel, which I cancelled, at a cost of more than £2 billion—that money ought instead to be used as a down payment on reopening closed rail lines in the deprived parts of the south-west.
As for buses, have you tried to get one outside London? And attempted to use your payment card for a swift contactless transaction? You stand a better chance of winning the lottery.
So here are a few things that should be done immediately.
Elon Musk should be held to his promise to allow other cars besides Teslas to use his charging points, for a proper fee. This year. And the British government should work with the European Commission—not so long ago we used to do that automatically, of course—so that an interoperable electric car charging infrastructure soon exists across Europe.
Legislation to take HS2 from Birmingham north-west to Manchester and north-east to Leeds should be introduced into parliament. This year.
A plan with timelines for HS3 to link the great northern cities and towns of Liverpool, Manchester, Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds, Hull, York and Newcastle should be published. This year.
A plan with timelines for every city to have contactless payment on buses, and for a regulated network of regular buses serving every notable district and town, should be published. This year.
A reverse-Beeching plan, with timelines, for all 30 towns of over 25,000 people who lack a rail connection to regain one, should be published. This year.
Then Britain will have a modern, green transport policy worth the name.
