Great Western Coffee Shop

Parliamentary committees put out a lot of reports on stuff, most of which has not much effect, and for a Lords' committee on something like "built environment" the impact is likely to be close to zero. However, they have been looking at some interesting ideas. Practical and likely to happen? I'm not so sure.

No PDF that I can see, so the report is in this page (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5803/ldselect/ldbuiltenv/89/8902.htm).

I had some input indirectly in the Ticketing chapter.

To be fair, Stuving, that looks much better than a lot of the policy related material I have seen over the years, with quite a good wide-ranging review of the issues. I think that the conflicting policy problems are usefully highlighted. For too many years we have had policy making by slogan ("levelling up" being just the latest) rather than serious holistic consideration of the problems as a whole. To be fair, that is the real hard challenge!

There are a few points I think were missed (or beyond what seemed quite a wide brief)-

1 - The totally haphazard structure of local and regional government in the UK.  The mixture of single tier, county & district and mayoral authorities across the country, based on boundaries that have often been fixed as a result of old political horse-trading rather than any sensible analysis of travel-to-work areas hinders proper regional and local planning.

2 -I think that they could have been bolder on the relationship between transport planning and general planning - transport plans should always form part of robust local development plans.

3 - One problem hinted at that needs to be acknowledged is that many (most?) of our towns and cities have layouts fixed over most of their centres and many of their suburbs back in the 19th century or in the first part of the 20th. This makes it much more difficult to deliver all the desirable elements of public and sustainable transport infrastructure, like bus- and cycle-lanes, light rail or trams.

  

PDF at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5803/ldselect/ldbuiltenv/89/89.pdf (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5803/ldselect/ldbuiltenv/89/89.pdf)