Eastern Regional Planning Assessment for the railway: Introduction

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(Covering North & East London and the East of England)

Introduction

In 2005, over one billion passenger trips were made on the national rail network, up by over a third since 1997, making Britain's the fastest-growing railway in Europe. Strong growth is expected to continue.

The Government wants to support the growth of Britain's railways. It is spending an unprecedented £87m each week on the network. With government support, Network Rail is embarked on a nationwide programme of infrastructure renewals exceeding £2 billion per year in value. Meanwhile, thanks to public and private investment in rolling stock, Britain now has one of the youngest train fleets in Europe.

As announced in the 2004 Rail White Paper, the Government has now taken on responsibility for setting the national strategy for the railways. Under the new arrangements, the Government will set the level of public expenditure to be dedicated to railways and take the strategic decisions on what this should buy. The Government will set out what it wishes to buy from Network Rail in the period 2009-2014 in the High Level Output Specification (HLOS). This is expected to be published in 2007, and will accompany a statement of the Government's longer-term strategy.

Regional Planning Assessments (RPAs) are designed to inform the development of the government's strategy for the railway. The objective of RPAs is to develop an understanding of the challenges and options for development of the railway in each region over the next twenty years, in the wider context of forecast change in population, the economy and travel behaviour, and associated regional spatial planning policy and strategy. The RPA sets out the government's current thinking on how the railway might best be developed to allow wider objectives to be met, and identifies the priorities for further development work. Identified priorities for further examination provide a focus for work going forward but do not constitute a commitment to implementation; each proposal will need to be worked up more fully, including demonstrating its affordability and value for money for the taxpayer, before any government support for implementation is considered.

The RPA programme was established by the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) and responsibility for it has now passed to the Department for Transport (DfT). Development of the RPA benefitted from extensive and constructive engagement with regional planning and development bodies in London and the East of England, local authorities, rail industry partners and the statutory rail passengers' bodies, as well as ODPM, government offices and other government agencies. This was invaluable in developing a common joined-up understanding of the area's key planning, transport and rail issues.

RPAs also provide a background for future Network Rail Route Utilisation Strategies and to the work of key stakeholders on their own transport priorities (for example, the TfL programme of Rail Corridor Plans).

The RPA Area

The Eastern RPA covers the East of England planning region, Milton Keynes and 16 boroughs of north, east and central London. London is the largest population centre in the area. Key centres outside London include Cambridge, Ipswich, Milton Keynes, Norwich, Peterborough, Southend, Chelmsford, Colchester, Luton, Bedford and Watford.

The rail network in the RPA area comprises six routes radial to London (the southern parts of the West Coast, Midland and East Coast Main Lines and the West Anglia, Great Eastern and London, Tilbury & Southend routes), plus the North London Lines and all other cross-regional routes and rural branches in the East of England. In order to include the West Coast Main Line south of Milton Keynes in a single RPA, Milton Keynes in the South East England planning region was included in the RPA area.

The RPA area is in general characterised by economic success. Economic growth in the East of England and London has been consistently higher than the UK average in recent years, and the area has undergone substantial change. Key trends include the growth of the central London "world city" economy, growth in the wider region in locations enjoying good access to London, the international airports and the rest of the country, the beginning of the transformation of east London and the Thames Gateway and the emergence of Cambridge as a location of national importance in the knowledge-based industries. However, economic change, especially change and declining employment in the manufacturing, agriculture and traditional domestic tourism sectors, has adversely affected a number of places in the RPA area.