Transport is local, but not only local

The principles are hard to argue with

Subsidiarity has a long intellectual pedigree. I’d argue, as would the new resident in Number 10, that local accountability produces better decisions, and that proximity to the problem can sharpen the answer. Local level decision making, at scale, becomes a form of experimentation, generating an evidence base that centralised planning can't easily replicate.

The context in the UK matters: England is one of the most centralised countries in the developed world. Around 95% of all taxes in England are collected centrally. The Blair-era devolution push for the nations didn’t really change anything for England, with Westminster continuing to decide for an incredibly diverse population, and London and the South East benefiting disproportionately.

There is plenty to feel unhappy about. Repeated attempts at “levelling up” and building a “northern powerhouse” have not amounted to much. Our secondary cities are far poorer and less productive than secondary cities in other developed nations. In a nation which has experienced productivity growth collapse, no-one is arguing against the need for change.

Burnham claims that Manchester is proof of devolved decision-making leading to better outcomes and, at first glance, devolved authorities do seem to have been success stories. Andy Street and Andy Burnham both describe this as “politics done differently” and “putting place first”, transcending left/right arguments and delivering for their regions.

The strongest version of the devolution case is not simply that local leaders know more. It is that the role changes the incentive structure: metro mayors are rewarded for visible problem-solving in a place, while Westminster too often rewards party-line discipline on blanket policies. Even if Westminster policy is good policy - there isn’t the air time to convey local nuance. It doesn’t work as well as it could.

I am wary, however, of the risk of confirmation bias and oversimplification, particularly when it comes to transport. Despite the lessons of the past, there is a lot of rhetoric at the moment about simple answers to complex problems. It’s worth digging into a few case studies to see how this shapes up as a model, a model our next PM wishes to apply elsewhere.

A selection of case studies

Greater Manchester's Bee Network is a good case study to begin with, for obvious reasons. Bus franchising looks to have worked very well. Ridership up 14% year-on-year, contactless fare caps in place, free travel for young people.

Next we have PAYG trials on Northern and East Midlands Railway are another example of where more local decision making is taking place with a local technology trial. GPS-based ticketing that automatically finds the best fare is producing positive early results. Passengers describe it as simple and trustworthy.

Scotland's experiments are instructive in a different way. Peak fares were abolished, then reinstated, then permanently abolished again. The mTicket format persists where far better digital ticketing alternatives exist elsewhere.

These are experiment results: data, including data about what doesn't work.

We need to be careful about what we're observing

Burnham is unusually transport-literate for a mainstream politician — and that’s great - but transport literacy and a delivery plan that works everywhere are different things. The Bee Network is a record. Whether it constitutes a national model is a separate question.

Selection bias is a genuine problem here. The places with the capacity and political infrastructure to run these experiments are not representative places. Greater Manchester had, by many accounts, an exceptional mayor, strong economic diversity, and population density that makes integrated transport economically viable (more on this in a moment). The experiment is weighted toward success precisely because it happens where the conditions for success already exist.

What the Manchester evidence tells us is what's possible in strong metropolitan areas with the right political leadership. It tells us almost nothing about Shrewsbury or King’s Lynn, Cumbria or Northumberland.

Those PAYG trials were centrally approved, governed by centrally set standards, are monitored by DfT, part funded by DfT and run by technology provided by the private sector. Still successes, but not on account of a devolution agenda.

The risk here is conflating two separate claims: that devolution is normatively preferable - the subsidiarity principles are sound, local accountability matters - and that devolution is causally responsible for the outcomes we observe. Manchester's 14% ridership uplift may tell us more about Andy Burnham than about the devolution model. And with a sample of one, the model isn't separable from the man.

There is another ambiguity too: accountability is not the same as control. One of the practical strengths of metro mayors is that people now have someone visible to complain to when the system fails. That is better than the old fragmented accountability vacuum. But it can also create an accountability sink, where a mayor is publicly responsible for outcomes without holding the money, legal powers, or operational levers needed to fix them.

There is also a cost question the Burnham narrative tends to skip. Transport for Greater Manchester's bus franchising cost around £134m to set up, with ongoing subsidy running at approximately £227m per year and rising. London — the nearest comparator — saw bus subsidy rise from around £600m pre-pandemic to £1.1bn, with forecasts of £1.7bn if trends continue.

Bus ridership has increased in other cities through more targeted interventions at significantly lower cost. The integrated ticketing works; the question is whether the 14% uplift is explained by public control specifically, or whether the spend-to-outcome ratio holds at national scale. Green Signals, whose panel includes former Network Rail chair Richard Bowker, put it plainly: Manchester may be right for Manchester, but it is not automatically a low-cost national model.

Transport is national infrastructure

This is the point that the devolution thesis doesn't fully reckon with.

Transport is situated in localities. But it is the veins and arteries of a country. A vein doesn't stop at a county boundary. An artery doesn't serve one city. The passenger travelling from Leeds to London, or from the Welsh borders to Birmingham, is not making a local journey through a series of local systems. They are using national infrastructure.

The March 2026 Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and Welsh governments on rail reform makes this point plainly. Even where devolution is most advanced - a devolved nation, its own rail operator, statutory transport powers - the cross-border complexity of rail required months of negotiation to produce a formal agreement with the national rail body. Devolution in transport is real. It is also not neat.

This has a direct consequence for the devolution argument. If transport is national infrastructure, then connectivity to King’s Lynn or Wrexham isn't a local problem to be solved by local decision-making. It's a national obligation, in the same way that nobody seriously argues water infrastructure or electricity grids should be devolved to the point of incompatibility - exactly the fragmentation that rail privatisation, some might say, produced.

The patchwork risk is very much a now problem. It is an unanswered question as t how interoperable locally driven and delivered PAYG schemes will be, especially for travellers unfamiliar of a given area, or someone who is travelling between PAYG islands.

The Railways Bill's creation of Great British Railways is an implicit acknowledgement of this tension. Trunk route capacity, access rights, fares architecture, interoperability standards - these are decisions that no mayoral authority can make unilaterally, because their consequences extend beyond any single area.

The honest conclusion

Devolution is not a universal template, and transport is the wrong domain for slogans. The useful question is not whether decisions should be local or national. It is what kind of decision we are talking about.

The IFS put the cost of centralised thinking plainly with a thought experiment: if the £100bn committed to HS2 had instead been distributed to city regions to spend as they chose — a tram system in Leeds, suburban rail in Sheffield — would the outcomes have been more visible by now? It's an open question, not a settled one. But it captures the core tension: national planning at its worst produces one very expensive, very slow decision. Distributed planning at its best produces many smaller, faster ones. The case for national coordination of standards and trunk infrastructure is real. The case for national control of every spending decision is much weaker.

This is why fiscal devolution matters. As Burnham and Street both imply, money is power. If city regions remain dependent on bidding into central government, then devolution is still conditional. Local leaders may have visibility and convening power, but the centre still decides the size of the envelope, the rules of the game, and often the acceptable answer.

Decisions about local service design, bus networks, station access, local fares experiments and user needs should sit as close to the place as possible. Decisions about trunk capacity, rail standards, fares architecture, ticketing interoperability, cross-border services and national investment priorities need national framing.

But to nail my colours to the mast: I'd like to give a final +1 for stronger devolution. Local leaders are the perfect advocates for places when national system-level planning is undertaken. They should be able to argue, loudly and with legitimacy, when the system risks depriving a city or region in the name of efficiency, abstraction or national interest.

This isn't tidy, nor is it simple, but I do believe a hybrid of local and national could work better than what we've had in recent decades and I do believe it could play a part in stronger economic growth, particularly outside London and the South-East.

Sources

• Memorandum of Understanding between UK Government and Welsh Government on Rail Reform in the Wales and Borders Area. GOV.WALES / Department for Transport, 25 March 2026.
• Green Signals, Ep. 145: Will Andy Burnham splash the cash on rail? (2026). Nigel Harris and Richard Bowker.
• IFS Zooms In: Will devolution solve the UK's economic woes? (2026). Christine Farquhar, Tony Travers (LSE), David Phillips. Institute for Fiscal Studies podcast.
• What will Burnham mean for transport? (2026). Network News. YouTube transcript.
• What is Manchesterism? (2026). Merryn Somerset Webb, John Stepek, Roger Lee. Merryn Talks Money / Bloomberg.
• A Tale of Two Cities — Andy Burnham and Andy Street (2026). Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell with Andy Burnham and Andy Street. The Rest Is Politics / Leading.