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Transcript

Happy New Year! I hope you had a great festive holiday after what was a very busy year indeed for the Transport East partnership.

It was a very productive and transformational year for transport in the East of England and I’d like to thank the hundreds of partners and stakeholders who worked really closely with us to help make the case for better transport investment in the East.

I’d like to thank our board members and our senior officers from local transport authorities for their ongoing guidance and support, without which we couldn’t do any of the work that we currently do. And I’d like to thank the Transport East team as well for their ongoing expertise and commitment. A small team that’s perfectly formed and punching above their weight.

Indeed, it really was a year of change. The new government came in after the election in the summer and very quickly set out five new priorities for transport.

Firstly, around rail reform, bringing together track and operations into one body, Great British Railways, and setting the scene for nationalisation of private rail companies. For the East of England this is significant. Greater Anglia and C2C are two of the first companies across England that will come back into public ownership.

Secondly, government set out their aspirations for bus franchising, giving local authorities more power over buses in their areas in the East. This isn’t going to look like London or Manchester or Liverpool and we need to work out a model that works for the places in the East of England.

Thirdly, government have set out their priorities for more equal transport. So making sure that those people who are socially excluded from transport ensures that transport is not a barrier for them going forward in achieving what they want to do in the East. One in three people live in a rural area, so we in particular have a case around better transport to serve equality.

Fourthly, government have set out their aspirations for greener transport. Now in the east, we know that 42% of all emissions come from transport and that’s higher than most other regions in the UK. This is because of the high amount of freight that we have going through our region and the high amount of rural trips. So, we can work closely with government now to ensure that they’re fulfilling that objective in the east.

And fifthly, government have set out their aspirations for an Integrated National Transport strategy. This will make sure that all actors in the transport space are working towards a common set of objectives, bringing together what is often a fragmented system to really focus on the user.

This is all really encouraging for the East of England and we’ve worked hard as Transport East to prepare the region for this.

Firstly, in 2024, we recruited a new chair, Will Quince, who’s the first Independent Chair of Transport East. Will has spent a lot of time over 2024 getting to know the leaders and businesses across the East of England and is now helping us to make the case to government for better investment and better transport decisions for the East of England.

This is underpinned by the Regional Transport strategy that we already had accepted by the Secretary of State in the previous year.

We’ve done a lot of other work across the course of 2024. For example, in the spring we published our Rural Connections report. This was a year’s worth of work with our team bringing together representatives from the private sector, the charity sector, the public sector, a call for evidence in which hundreds of people across the East sent in their ideas about rural transport. We launched the report in government, which set out recommendations for local, regional and national government.

We held the East’s first major behaviour change survey, so we surveyed over 4000 people in 2024 to really get under the skin of why they travel, what their barriers are and what we could do in the East to make their travel better. This is going to be really useful for our local authorities to plan better transport for their citizens going forwards.

We know that 2030 now is only five years away, the deadline for when there will be no new petrol and diesel car sales in the UK. We in the East must make sure that we’re ready for that, and our EV work is a key part of preparing our local authorities. We know that charging infrastructure needs to be accelerated and what this report does is sets out where in the East we can do that best, where we should do it first, where it can be prioritised and what the blockers are. Local authorities are now using that report to accelerate EV provision in their area.

We’ve also done a lot of work of buses. In 2024 in London we held the first Wider South East event for enhanced partnership chairs. Enhanced partnerships are those local authority and bus run partnerships in each of the local authority areas that are focused on how buses can be better delivered.

We also know that active travel is going to be a key aspect of local authority local transport plans. So we worked with Sustrans to develop a wider transport strategy for active travel for the East of England, set out a blueprint of what needs to be done and prioritised to really help what people convert to walking, cycling and wheeling.

And we also did a lot of evidence building around transport related social exclusion to make sure that we have a full picture of where people aren’t able to access services that they need to, to ensure that we can provide for them in the future.

We also did a huge amount of work in single voice in our collective advocacy to government to making sure that everyone is on the same page around what we’re telling government, around what the priorities are.

There’s a huge amount of work to do in the years ahead to deliver the transport strategy and lots of investment that is needed in our region. However, there was some great progress from our local authorities in 2024 and delivering some of the key schemes that we need.

So, congratulations to Norfolk County Council and Great Yarmouth Borough Council for delivering the Herring Bridge in Great Yarmouth, providing transformational economic connectivity between two sides of the river there, and also the Gull Wing Bridge in Lowestoft. Congratulations to Suffolk County Council and East Suffolk Council again providing transformational economic benefits.

It was great to go down to Chelmsford with the Transport East Board on the invitation of Essex County Council to see the new station being developed at Beaulieu Park. When complete it will support thousands of new homes across Chelmsford and also support connectivity up and down that Great Eastern Main Line. It was also really good to see the progress on the Long Stratton bypass.

Resilience is going to be key going forwards. The East of England, the lowest lying region of the UK and historically underfunded with maintenance.

So, great to see that National Highways delivering the A12 concrete Road scheme and the improvements with regards to maintenance on the A11 as well. And in the budget in October, we saw £47 million for buses across the East of England.

Really encouraging and we need to see that being built on in the years ahead to ensure that users have a much better bus system to really support their sustainable transport options. So 2025 will be hopefully another productive year for the Transport East partnership. There’s a lot of work to do here to keep delivering our strategy.

I’m really excited that we’re going to be involved in the government’s Integrated National Transport Strategy. We’re going to be working with our local authorities as a devolution partner, making sure that the strategic transport functions that are needed at that sub national level continue to be performed in the years ahead, really supporting strategic rail, strategic roads going forwards.

We’re going to be supporting our partners with a submission to the spending review leading the East of England’s offer and asks to government in June. The government will decide the three-year funding allocations for the years ahead. We’re pulling together an evidence base for submission in February that we’ll set out what our priorities are going to be and why the East is absolutely fundamental to the wider UK economy.

And we’re also supporting rail reform as well. We want to make sure that our local authorities have a say in the new body, Great British Railways, and the transition of C2C and Greater Anglia to public ownership goes smoothly. And we’re going to be working with government and our local authorities to ensure that happens.

So a very, very busy and interesting year ahead and we look forward to working with all of you to deliver that.

Thank you very much.