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The top 60 travel to work areas in England have been expanded to 80 and notable additions in the South West are Trowbridge, Newbury, Poole and Cheltentham. Most of the South East and Central Southern England is included, but further South West only the south of Devon through to Plymouth makes the grade. Notably, Bath and Salisbury are not included. Station service wise, the specification is two trains per hour acheievable in the peak direction, and we are looking as I read it as development totally within 800 metres of the station.
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There is no mention of the word "peak" in the Lichfields report (nor in NPPF).
But, it was your reference to Trowbridge, Bath and Salisbury that was the eye-opener. My first thought (well, almost...) was:
"what were the designers of the station criteria trying to achieve?"Firstly, the NPPF section we're concerned with here is covering developments
outside settlements.
Exactly how settlement boundaries are calculated is a bit arcane, but I'm assuming that NPPF is relying on existing methods that do tend to produce something that appears intuitively right.
It's the development that has to outside the settlement, not the station. So, we could be looking at (for example) Castle Cary, where the station in in the fields, or we could be considering any station in a village or small town where an 800 metre walk could get you from the development to the station. Even a larger town, where the station is off-centre (Melksham?).
We've already discussed the service frequency. Whatever the detail, it's sensible for the policy to only permit development where the station is somewhat useful.
Now, why top 80 Travel-to-Work areas for GVA?
First thing to understand is where the TTW area concept comes from. According to Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_to_work_area:
A travel to work area is a collection of wards for which "of the resident economically active population, at least 75% actually work in the area, and also, that of everyone working in the area, at least 75% actually live in the area".
I have no idea how the two criteria are manipulated in such a way that nowhere is left out of a TTW, but the resulting map can be seen at
https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/documents/534c0129bdc14be5aa270a919668a3d4/exploreIt mostly looks sort-of-realistic, although the Merthyr Tydfil TTW area, for example, looks unnatural (for want of a better term).
The TTWs represent areas with a high degree of
self-containment; people both work and live in the same TTW.
However, there is a huge difference in the working population contained within these TTWs, which naturally affects the GVA obtained in each.
There's also a variation in the per-capita GVA: somehow, Swindon TTWA beats London into 2nd place and Salisbury, Trowbridge, Bath and Taunton come in that (decreasing GVA/cap) order in the 2023 data
While the productivity (GVA/cap) is notable, I think the population variation between TTWAs is more significant. It appears that Bath TTWA has about three-quarters of the working population of Trowbridge TTWA.
What does this mean for the chances of station-related development? To be in the top 80 GVA list, your TTWA could be:
* an area of high population density
* an area that is
not surrounded by competing work locations that eat into the size of the TTWA (and hence population and GVA - bye bye Bath)
* an area that is not so rural that the TTWA population is below (say) 100k (that's Taunton out...)
The TTWA criterion gives some odd results: Poole TTWA is OK for station-related development but Weston-S-M is not.
Thus, in summary, our hypothetical developer is looking for:
* A station in the fields or near the edge of an existing town;
* ... that has a frequent service to somewhere-or-other
* ... in an area that already has a high population and is not surrounded by other workplace destinations (so where are the trains going?).
"what were the designers of the station criteria trying to achieve?"I still don't know.
Click on the map to explore geographics
