Midlands Connect is one of seven sub-national transport bodies set up across the UK in 2016 to coordinate and accelerate the development of strategic transport investment plans beyond local authority borders. Chief executive Maria Machancoses explains why this acceleration is vital to drive the economy of the Midlands region and the nation as a whole.
Midlands Connect chief executive Maria Machancoses is very clear about the primary strategic transport challenge facing the region as it emerges from the Covid-19 crisis and prepares to lead the UK’s economic revival: what is needed is a long-awaited transformation of the region’s east-west connectivity.
“The number one thing that the Midlands acknowledges is that all of our strategic rail and road corridors currently run north to south,” explains Machancoses. “We want to start championing and identifying better ways to improve the region’s east to west connectivity.”
“We want to start championing and identifying better ways to improve the region’s east to west connectivity.”
Midlands Engine Rail renaissance
A holistic transport strategy
At the heart of this strategy is an investment plan to tackle the region’s long neglected rail services and road connections, while introducing new customer-friendly and passenger attractive innovations to drive and accelerate network’s usage.
Midlands Engine Rail is the flagship proposal for the region, a £3.7bn programme of seven distinct upgrades to create better east-west connectivity and create a rail renaissance so that towns and cities are connected and better integrated with the new HS2 line.
“Almost 91% of journeys east-west are made by car because the railways are pretty much non-existent,” explains Machancoses. “If you want to travel from, say, Shropshire to Nottingham by rail then best of luck – it is very difficult. Hence one of the biggest strategic priorities is Midlands Engine Rail.”
But it is not all about rail. The whole Midlands region benefits from the road investment and Midlands Connect has identified a number of corridors into which it believes government and its strategic highways company Highways England should channel investment.
Road upgrades to underpin industry recovery
This starts with upgrading the A46, the trans-Midlands trade corridor from the M5 in Gloucestershire across to Grimsby and Humberside. This route is crucial for businesses throughout the Midlands region looking to export goods via East Midlands Airport and the Humber seaports.
Then there is the A5 Midlands Logistics Corridor which links Staffordshire eastwards to Leicestershire and Warwickshire, again a key corridor to allow business to distribute goods across the region.
Midlands Connect is a coalition of local authority leaders and policy makers across the Midlands region with a clear mandate from government to research, develop and identify the key major strategic infrastructure requirements for the region. It is funded by the Department for Transport and is, in effect, the transport advice arm of the wider Midlands Engine economic and social growth partnership. Both bodies are chaired by business guru and Experian founder Sir John Peace.
As a sub-national transport body, Midlands Connect is focused on bringing the region together and assembling the evidence needed to convince government to invest in the region. But, unlike Transport for the North, it currently has no statutory powers, operating instead as a partnership to make the powerful case for investment.
“We decided that, at the moment, we'd rather use the public funding to progress with priorities, rather than taking us through a legal process to become statutory authority,” explains Machancoses. “Our priority right now is to actually crack on with the job and get business cases to government for investment. And, in reality, we have not seen any difference in the way that government engages with Midlands Connect compared to Transport for the North.”
Machancoses is now deeply embedded in the process of refreshing the Midlands Connect Strategy, first published in March 2017, to take account of the new post-Brexit, post-Covid transport demand landscape. This document will focus on economic recovery and growth; levelling-up; climate change and carbon, and is due out in spring next year once government publishes its Transport Decarbonisation Plan, Integrated Rail Plan and the Levelling Up White Paper.
What Midlands Connect has set out to achieve is encouraging and inspiring for business across the region. The next question to consider is how we will get there; how do we move from this high-level view of needs and objectives, to looking at the detail? It is this process that will take the time.
There are a number of challenges that I think Midlands Connect should now be considering:
Establishing Midlands
Connect’s role
for the
coming years
Until now, Midlands Connect has done an excellent job acting as a think tank, carrying out research and coming up with great ideas to help the region move forward. The key challenge now is defining what the next stage of development is, and how we get there.
Maria Machancoses has said that putting business cases to the government for investment is a priority, but I wonder whether they should be thinking about considering their role as being broader – for example producing blueprints that show people what is required of them as a community, a region, a stakeholder or a business. Or, for this same group, produce a delivery model.
Accessing funding
for projects
The Treasury will naturally always be a key source of funding for key projects across the region. That said, if Midlands Connect has identified something as a priority, or research has shown that is it critical, then lack of Treasury funding should not be an obstacle.
For this reason, private funding, or public-private partnerships will undoubtedly have an increasing role to play in bringing infrastructure project ideas to life.
Engagement with stakeholders and
the public
It will be essential for Midlands Connect to engage with stakeholders sooner rather than later. Now is the time to find out not only what they feel they need, but also what they can offer – and to ensure that stakeholders are working together to avoid conflicts further down the line.
We talk about the triangle of Nottingham, Leicester and Derby, but we need to make sure that key organisations and businesses in the three cities are consulted on how they feel they stand to benefit from the planned improvements. Could they, for example, benefit further from links with other university cities in the Midlands, not least Birmingham?
Building the
necessary skills and resources
It is widely accepted in the industry that there is a shortage of the skills, resources and materials required to deliver the infrastructure and development projects in the pipeline, and this needs to be taken into consideration in future planning.
One way that Midlands Connect can begin to overcome this is by engaging early with the likes of Network Rail, design houses, engineering firms, specialist suppliers and businesses. And they must learn from the other key projects underway at the moment such as HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail.
Along with delivery partners such as Carter Jonas, these are the sorts of firms and organisations who can make it happen and Midlands Connect will need to start building resource now to deliver a few years down the line.
Christian Green is a partner and head of transport in the Carter Jonas infrastructures team, as well as head of the firm’s multi-disciplinary 100-strong Birmingham office.
Christian Green
Infrastructures Partner
at Carter Jonas
"Another crucial route is the A50/A500 North Midlands Manufacturing Corridor between Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Investment in this corridor would open up east-west routes, and supply chains between the UK’s manufacturing heartlands."
the Midlands
Coalition
to connect
Another important route is the A50/A500 North Midlands Manufacturing Corridor between Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Investment in this corridor would open up east-west routes, and supply chains between the UK’s manufacturing heartlands.
“We are saying don't just invest in the M6 and the M1 – but also invest in the A46, A50/500 and A5, as that will help the economy of the Midlands and switch the focus from north-south corridors to east-west,” says Machancoses.
“The car is part of the solution and it’s about how you make the most of existing infrastructure and invest in improving those roads,” she adds. “But it's not just about the concrete and asphalt. It starts with the corridor, but is also about investing in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, hydrogen fuel networks for HGV, making sure that cycle lanes are in place, plus installing fibre networks and communications. We need holistic transport infrastructure.”
"Smart ticketing is the final piece in the transport transformation puzzle"
Smart ticketing is the final piece in the transport transformation puzzle, putting in place the technology and strategic partnerships to give people access to the most cost-effective ways of getting around. While the government’s plans for Great British Rail promise to offer a single rail ticketing system across the UK, Machancoses want to see this go further to embed buses, trams, scooters and car sharing to open up transport across urban and rural areas.
“The technology is there – what it needs is the coordination,” says Machancoses. “West Midlands one is the most advanced and we're helping the whole region to adopt and learn from it.”
Following the lead of schemes such as Transport for London’s Oyster and contactless system, many areas across the Midlands already have smart ticketing schemes in place, such as the Swift card in the West Midlands and the Robin Hood card in Nottingham. The challenge for Midlands Connect is to bring these all together and link them under a single technology.
One of the key roles for Midlands Connect is to bring the vast number of local and unitary authorities, stakeholders, partners and businesses together to build a unified consensus. Given that some areas are very rural, while others are very dense urban, this is not always an easy task.
The key, explains Machancoses, is to listen to their priorities and to find the common ground, helping individual regions to accept that, while investment might not be going directly into their patch, they will still benefit from it.
When set up in 2016, Midlands Connect identified around 350 projects across the Midlands that were considered by stakeholders as a priority. Today, this has been narrowed down to a much more deliverable handful of strategically important interventions, avoiding duplication and allowing local schemes to be championed by local teams.
Collaboration is key
Smart technology to level up transport
"Covid has tripled the amount of freight on the roads as home deliveries have increased to the extent that we are now seeing hundreds of trips everyday through rural villages and towns, not just in cities."
For all the talk of hybrid workspaces and a continuation of working from home post-pandemic, the reality is that investment in transport will be just as important, says Machancoses.
Along with increased capacity and resilience on the road network, it will be crucial for the rail network to invest in timetables and services to allow for greater connectivity as travel patterns shift across the day and week and commutes potentially get longer as daily trips to local offices are replaced by less frequent commutes to head offices further away from home.
In addition, Covid has tripled the amount of freight on the roads as home deliveries have increased to the extent that we are now seeing hundreds of trips everyday through rural villages and towns not just in cities.
There is a massive challenge on rural roads – understanding what we have to do with freight on roads across the entire region, not just in the cities,” says Machancoses. “Investment in digital connectivity becomes increasingly important to ensure that delivery vans are connected to their operations and logistics centres and that in-car navigation systems work to avoid congestion.”
Post-Covid impetus for investment
The reality, post-pandemic, is that the pressure on the public purse has never been greater. For Machancoses, this makes the work of Midlands Connect even more vital, highlighting the key investment areas, making the case to government but crucially also working with Treasury to plan the way that investment is rolled out.
“We don't actually need £3.7 billion for Midlands Engine Rail to be delivered over the next five years,” she explains. “Be we need funding for the next 15 years – and it might be less. That is the mature conversation that we need to have with Treasury to help identify how best to invest and how we can help.”
Partnerships to secure funding
What Midlands Connect is trying to influence is national funding given to bodies such as Network Rail and Highways England under their multi-year funding deals. Yet, while there is no specific private sector role in these strategic investments, Midland Connect is certainly on hand to help Local Authorities prioritise and secure deals around, for example, electric vehicle charge network providers, telecoms firms or scooter hire businesses.
“Local Authorities have the powers to deliver that kind of infrastructure deal,” she explains. “What we do is create the business models that private sector will welcome, so as to help accelerate the roll out of infrastructure assets.”
“The reality, post-pandemic, is that the pressure on the public purse has never been greater.”
Midlands Connect is one of seven sub-national transport bodies set up across the UK in 2016 to coordinate and accelerate the development of strategic transport investment plans beyond local authority borders. Chief executive Maria Machancoses explains why this acceleration is vital to drive the economy of the Midlands region and the nation as a whole.
“The car is part of the solution and it’s about how you make the most of existing infrastructure and invest in improving those roads,” she adds. “But it's not just about the concrete and asphalt. It starts with the corridor, but is also about investing in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, hydrogen fuel networks for HGV, making sure that cycle lanes are in place, plus installing fibre networks and communications. We need holistic transport infrastructure.”