The King's Speech: A New Labour Government's Priorities
With a new Labour Government in place, today's King's Speech provided a first look at the priorities for the next term. It was encouraging to see transport and housing take center stage. While details are still scarce, we will unpack a few highlights and how Basemap has been assisting clients in these areas for the past decade.
A New Planning and Infrastructure Bill
The announcement to reform the existing national planning policy framework and the commitment to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years poses a real risk of centralising decisions, potentially taking them away from local elected governments. While little is known about the specifics, one of the biggest concerns in local planning relates to access and traffic. This is where our TRACC software has been invaluable, ensuring development is carried out sustainably. For more information, see how Staffordshire, Harrogate, and Bryan G Hall have utilised TRACC.
TRACC supports the creation of local plans and allows for modeling changes such as improvements to walking, cycling, and public transport around new sites. This ensures that access is considered at the design stage. It should help meet the goal of improving local planning decisions, and using tools like TRACC should allow for quicker decisions on sites, thus improving capacity to analyse more sites quicker. TRACC is already helping clients make decisions around transport-oriented development, and its interoperability with other tools ensures that data is not siloed.
Highways Analyst provides vital insights into existing pinch points on the networks and identifies where increased traffic loads could add pressure. By combining this with TRACC outputs, a comprehensive view of current access to new developments can be obtained, allowing for informed changes. This can be done at both local and national levels, providing an authoritative view of accessibility. See how Mersey Travel used Highways Analyst here.
A Better Buses Bill
The last government recognised the importance of buses post-COVID in facilitating mobility. The rise of Bus Service Improvement Partnerships ensured buses worked better for people. Dozens of our clients have utilised TRACC to plan and optimise bus routes. We even released a feature in TRACC V 2.1, requested by clients, to help bulk change timetables and represent bus prioritisation/bus lanes. Our recent survey showed that 25% of our TRACC users are already utilising this feature.
This aligns with the Department for Transport's goals to improve bus services across the country and increase ridership through better integration with other modes. A significant focus will be on allowing more franchising from local authorities, providing more control over funding, and increasing accountability. It's interesting to note that bus commuters contribute £64 billion annually to the economy, despite a decline of 300 million miles driven since 2010. This is an exciting area where TRACC enables connections between people and places, allowing easy analysis of walking, cycling, and public transport.
Conclusion
We believe there is a real sense of optimism in these two areas, and Basemap has been assisting clients since the last Labour government. For those who remember Accession, it was built off requirements set by Labour in the 2000s and was proudly supported by us from its launch in 2004 until TRACC's release in 2013. If you want to know how TRACC or Highways Analyst can support you, please get in contact.