You may have heard Chancellor Rachel Reeves saying the other day that “the world has changed” and more cuts are coming on top of the cuts she’s announced already. But if only the world had changed a little bit more than it has. If only we lived in a world where we weren’t still spending millions of pounds on the wrong things. I’ll give you an example.
It began in 2016 when the Scottish Government announced they would be spending £200million on the rail services between the central belt and Aberdeen. The money would be spent, they said, on a number of measures including upgrading signals and putting in additional loops to allow freight trains to pass, with the aim of making the journey quicker. Twenty minutes quicker to be precise.
The first question to ask – and I remember asking it at the time – is: why? I know that journey from the central belt very well and have taken the train between Aberdeen and Glasgow Queen Street hundreds of times and on the whole it’s pretty good: frequent, reliable and fast, about 2 hours 40 minutes on average. I accept there may be some people who urgently need to get to, or away from, Aberdeen in 2 hours 20 minutes instead, but it’s hard to believe that shaving 20 minutes off the time is going to make much of a difference to anyone really.
But even if we accept that making the journey marginally faster is a good aim, the next question is how much it’ll cost to do it and whether we could be spending the money on something better instead. We know what happened to HS2. We were told it would cut journey times between London and Birmingham by 36 minutes. But the world changed as Rachel Reeves might say, the pandemic hit, people started working from home, and the cost to cut a few minutes off a train journey started to look like bad value for money.
The same sort of assessment should be applied to the Aberdeen project even though it’s on a much smaller scale, and it looks like, behind the scenes, the Scottish Government may be starting to do it. The transport minister Fiona Hyslop told Holyrood in January that there’d been no change to the scope of the project and it remained the aim to reduce average rail journey times between Aberdeen and the central belt by 20 minutes. But we’ve now also learned that, on the quiet, the completion date of 2026 has been dropped.
So what’s going on? It may be that dropping the 2026 date is the first stage of the government quietly backing away from the project altogether, although Transport Scotland said the other day that the package of improvements was still in place. It may also be true that the government will never get close to the £200m it promised – since the project was announced, only £16m has actually been spent.
But assuming we can take the government at its word, and that the improvements will be made and the £200m will eventually materialise, we’re still left with the question of whether the money is being spent in the right way. One way of looking at it is that every minute saved on the Aberdeen train will cost £10m, which makes them pretty pricey minutes. But another way of looking at it is that £200m is being wasted on the wrong train line.
What I mean by that is that making journeys between Aberdeen and Glasgow, or Birmingham and London, a little bit faster is an expensive and wasteful option compared to creating more journeys overall by opening new lines or reopening old ones. We saw it last year with Levenmouth in Fife and we’re seeing it again this year with the opening of the new line through Blyth in Northumberland. The routes were closed down, among many others, by Beeching in the 60s, but bit by bit, railway sleeper by railway sleeper, some of the cuts are being reversed.
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The case for reopening the lines is economically sound: relatively deprived parts of the country like Fife and Northumberland need more investment and economic and social opportunities, as well as more people, and trains can help to bring that about. If you don’t believe me, take a trip on the Borders line and look at all the housing that’s sprung up at Newtongrange and Gorebridge since the line reopened 10 years ago. Trains attract money.
There will be some who argue that Aberdeen also needs that kind of help– and having just seen the state of the city on a recent visit, I’m inclined to agree. But the profound problems Aberdeen faces – the crisis in the oil and gas industry, the population decline, the council’s disastrous anti-traffic measures – aren’t going to be fixed by getting businessmen up to the city 20 minutes quicker. There’s already a train service they can rely on that is perfectly good and efficient.
A better option would be to take inspiration from the successful examples in Fife and Northumberland and start to think about reopening the train line from Aberdeen to Fraserburgh and Peterhead. Both of those towns suffer badly from deprivation and part of the explanation is their relative disconnection. Most of the economic opportunities that do still exist are down the road in Aberdeen, and Fraserburgh to Aberdeen is over an hour by car (if you’re lucky which you probably won’t be). A train line would make things easier, and cheaper and better and when things are easier, and cheaper and better, investors and developers start to get interested.
Reopening old rail lines isn’t a panacea clearly, and to be honest Beeching was probably right to ditch the Fraserburgh line when he did because it wasn’t well used by the 1960s. But the point is that back then, the fishing industry was still thriving and there were plenty of opportunities in the towns; 50 years on, that isn’t the case and the economics have shifted. So much so that the railway expert David Spaven, whose most recent book looks at the Beeching cuts, thinks a railway line to Peterhead and Fraserburgh should be Scotland’s top priority rail re-opening project.
If you’re worried about the cost of all of this and what Rachel Reeves might think, worry not. The cost of reopening the Levenmouth line was £116m which is getting on for half the projected cost of cutting a few measly minutes off the Aberdeen line. The potential returns are also greater: Aberdeen already has a railway line to the central belt, but reopening Peterhead and Fraserburgh, and other places, creates opportunities that weren’t there before.
I suspect, as I said earlier, that the Scottish Government may be starting to realise all of this and has gone a bit cold on the Aberdeen project but isn’t prepared to admit it yet; the Tories have also pointed out that at the current rate, it’ll take 100 years to spend the £200m. But accepting what the government says and assuming it’s all still happening, it’s a worrying sign that we’re still working to the realities of 2015 rather than 2025. As Ms Reeves has pointed out, the world has changed. Time for our policy on trains to catch up.
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