Thread by @thomasforth

"How has the Government managed to spark a great trainline robbery row despite capital spending rising almost 50 per cent in the early 2020s and transport getting a big share of this rising pie?" ask @TorstenBell in his Top of the Charts. I'll explain. resolutionfoundation.org/comment/happy-…

@TorstenBell This is a "that's your GDP not ours" type story. Capital investment in transport in England (elsewhere is partly devolved) has been rising for two decades now and is at a record high. But it's not risen at all in Yorkshire or North East England. The increase is very London.

@TorstenBell The UK government has tried a few times to cook the books on this stuff. They tried (very quickly smacked down) to not assign Crossrail spending to a region because it was a "national project". They tried (for longer) with HS2 to assign the spending to regions it would benefit.

@TorstenBell Just to be clear what the UK government were doing,... they were assigning spending on Euston station in London as spending in Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds in the national accounts,... because the benefit would really be to all four cities. Thankfully this got overturned.

@TorstenBell At one point, in order to suggest that the UK government was investing very equally,... the Department for Transport and Chris Grayling defined Essex as not being in the South of England,... so that Crossrail spending wasn't counted there. tomforth.co.uk/transportspend…

As @JamesLewisLab points out in his piece in the Guardian today,... what little transport investment is left in Yorkshire after this weeks cuts is just reannouncements of things that have now been announced for decades and haven't happened.

@JamesLewisLab So The Treasury can do its forward projection of capital spending on transport. But we know that the UK government lie to us. And we know that they've failed to deliver in the past. So it would be insane to have any faith that this capital investment will actually happen here.

@JamesLewisLab And that's why it's a "great train robbery" narrative. There is precisely zero trust, even among the most trustworthy and reasonable and unionist Northerners, that the promised capital spending will happen. I suspect Transport for the North is being gutted for fear they'll check.

@JamesLewisLab I think it's good for London and the UK that Crossrail is getting finished, that Thameslink had a huge upgrade, that the tube is so thoroughly improved, and that HS2 will massively improving commuting North West of London. We wanted a slice of something similar. We won't get it.

@JamesLewisLab Here's the tool that will let you "do it per capita" and "consider London as part of the South East" or whatever other cope sceptics always inundate with me with to try and make it look less bad. But it's still really bad no matter how you dance around. open-innovations.org/projects/jrf/u…

Finally. The London spending remains relevant only for as long as the argument for cancelling the investment is that there isn't any money or that the investments aren't good enough value for money. Because the London investments are funded despite being poorer value for money.

It is a great shame to national cohesion that the far greater spending on poorer value projects so frequently happens in the national capital, the seat of government, and the location of the relevant government departments. I genuinely am not sniping at Londoners.