Will the East Midlands get the promised transport money?

When the East Midlands was first asked to choose a regional mayor for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire this year, one of the big selling points was a huge investment in transport infrastructure.

The previous government promised the mayor would spend £1.5 billion on improving connectivity – money saved by the cancellation of HS2 outside Birmingham.

At that time, ministers proposed it could be used to fund an expansion of Nottingham’s tram network and improve bus links between Derby and East Midlands Parkway.

Now, however, there is at least a question mark as to whether this will actually happen.

The winner of the May election, Labour’s Claire Ward, should have been the one to decide how the money was spent.

However, speaking to the BBC last week, she said she wasn’t sure it would ever happen.

“The reality is that the new government has come. She realizes that many of those commitments from the previous administration were simply built on sand. They just didn’t exist,” she said.

She stressed that whatever happens, there will be money available to spend on transport from the guaranteed “day-to-day” funding the new combined authority receives – which amounts to £38 million a year.

But asked whether she thinks separate £1.5bn transport investments could be cut in the next Budget, Ward said: ‘I don’t know, but I always said during my election that I would believe it if the elections would take place. the money ended up in the bank account.”

As always before the budget, ministries are unwilling to confirm or deny much.

A assessment of transportation projects however, it was announced in July by Transport Minister Louise Haigh.

“Communities across the country have become hopeful of new transportation infrastructure, with no plans or funding to make it happen. This government will not make that mistake,” she said at the time.

There are fears that specific projects in the region could also face the axe.

Plans to improve the A614 and A6097 in Nottinghamshire have been in the works for years, and the funding will be allocated by the Department for Transport.

Conservative Nottinghamshire County Council leader Ben Bradley said it was “a matter of days” before final confirmation would come when the general election was called – so much so that the council had placed signs along the route saying that the work is “coming soon”.

“We’re already four or five months behind schedule in terms of starting that work,” he said.

“Frankly, if we don’t get confirmation in the Budget heading into winter, when the challenges on our highways increase with the weather anyway, it’s going to be very, very difficult to get going on that.

“It’s clear that if we don’t get the money at all, it’s not going to happen.”

One theory is that the government will shift the burden of funding the work to the mayor of East Midlands.

In this scenario, the mayor would keep the £1.5 billion transport pot but would have to decide whether to use some of it to fund projects that would previously have been funded directly by the Department for Transport.

Bradley said the problems along the route were “a huge drag on the economy” and hampered housing development in the area.

For example, land on the site of the former Thoresby Colliery currently has planning permission for 800 homes, with the potential for up to 1,200, but a planning restriction means only around half can be built without improvements to nearby roads.

Ed Catchpole, regional director of the site’s developers – the Harworth Group – said he hoped for confirmation that work could go ahead in the budget.

“We need to ensure there is sufficient capacity on the local road network,” he said.

“Ollerton Roundabout is a particular bottleneck and has been in need of modernization for a number of years.”

He added that he believed funding should have been provided regardless of which party was in power.

“Brownfield regeneration of this nature involves political cycles and as such, public funding for critical infrastructure to support these sites must be set aside and allocated for the long term,” he said.