To grow the economy we need more trams, and fewer kebabs Britain’s second-tier cities are being held back by a simple problem, too many people still cannot get across them quickly enough to reach the jobs, customers and opportunities that drive growth.

Why do our second-tier cities underperform?
Why do we have fewer trams in the UK?

I try my best to give an answer to these two interconnected questions.

chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/to-grow-th...

This is exactly why we need to take on the CIBABs.

open.substack.com/pub/chriscur...

The Treasury saying a tram system could just be a bus instead, you say?! I'm shocked!

(Good bit of journaljsm to get hold of the report, irritatingly predictable central government report for those of us who've seen the tram wars play out before.)

I love the photos of the old Warrington Corporation Tramways trams. Still holding out hope for a Metrolink extension out our way in the future! 🚋

To be fair, there are at least some signs of life coming from DfT. When the integrated transport strategy was released last week, the announcement most people noticed was that Google Maps will finally start showing live bus locations and expected arrival times. While this is genuinely useful, it’s a feature the app has had for 15 years, waiting for us to catch up. But buried deeper in the detail of the strategy was a commitment to establish a Mass Transit Taskforce, following a recommendation from the New Towns Taskforce. They say it will “assess the wider economic, spatial and social benefits of integrated mass transit systems, and examine the funding, governance and delivery barriers that can impede their development.” That matters far more than the Google Maps headline, but only if the project is done properly. If it is simply parked inside the DfT, given the department’s longstanding allergy to light rail, there is every chance it ends up as the usual civil service exercise in self-obstruction. It should be run from the Cabinet Office, with enough clout to take on the Treasury, the DfT and the wider tangle of rules and habits that make trams so punishing to deliver. We have already seen the success of this approach with the Fingleton review into nuclear regulations. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones has asked for more of those kinds of cross-government taskforces to be proposed. On this issue, it is exactly what is needed.

The good news is that a lot of these challenges are comparatively easy to fix, and DfT has recently announced a Taskforce to look at it.

We just need to ensure it's serious about fixing these problems and not taken over by a load of CIBABs in DFT.

Chart showing that bus times in Birmingham are less variable than Tram times in Birmingham.

And that leads us onto CIBAB's, pronounced like Kebab. The people whose answer to every proposal is, “Can’t it be a bus?”

This is despite all the evidence that Trams support modal shift, have higher capacity, are permanent, support regeneration, are more accessible, and more reliable.

Part of that is cultural. The DfT takes heavy rail more seriously than light rail. We have hardly covered ourselves in glory there either, hello HS2, but it still carries more status inside the system. More officials work on it, more ministers talk about it, and more political attention flows towards big intercity projects than the less glamorous business of helping people get across large cities. Which is odd, because as set out above, urban mass transit makes a bigger difference to day-to-day life. Ad man Rory Sutherland has a joke about High Speed 1. He argues that instead of spending £6 billion to cut the London to Paris journey by 41 minutes, you could have hired the world’s top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Château Pétrus, still had roughly £5 billion left over, and ended up with passengers asking for the trains to be slowed down. For an occasional trip to Paris, and ignoring the mix-up over capital and day-to-day spend, he may even have a point. But for the daily commute across a big city, a small number of minutes stack up. The department is also scarred by tram projects that went wrong, above all Edinburgh, which became such a byword for delay, overspend and chaos that it spawned a full public inquiry. This fear has reached the point where, I’m told, a senior DfT official joked at their leaving drinks that their proudest achievement was making sure no new tram projects were brought forward over their years in the department. A fine record, if your goal is preserving departmental peace and quiet. Less fine if your goal is improving transport in Britain’s cities.

5. The Department for Transport really doesn’t like trams

For a range of cultural a historic reasons DfT have really gone off the idea of supporting Tram projects.

A culture has crept in of putting barriers in the way, rather than learning from past mistakes and working out how to do them well.

The chart, from Create Streets, shows the length of time it took to build 1 mile of tram extension in the West Midlands (13 years) compared to 12 miles in Dijon (4.5 years).

4. Overcentralisation

The Transport and Works Act Order process means that all local schemes need to be signed off by DFT, is incredibly expensive and can take well over a decade.

The government should just allow combined authorities to run there own approval processes for these schemes.

Quotes from Marin Fleetwood, a board member of "UK Tram". One reads “When we get the utilities moved they effectively have new for old and that is generally really expensive, [which is] a significant portion of the cost, up to a third of the cost of the track works.” The other reads “We (the U.K.) just went down the route of you need to move all the utilities to remove the disruption risk.”

3. Utilities

When Britain lays new tram track, utility firms can demand pipes and cables are moved, and the tram builder usually pays, meaning they get more moved than is necesary.

Costs are almost all paid (92.5%) for by the constructers in the UK, but split more equally in other countries.

2. Gold plating

Like much else, too may infrastructure projects in the UK are over-specced, which leads to extra cost.

The most relevant example is track depth, where we mostly dig to 600mm, compared to 300mm in most other places.

A picture of a perfectly pleasant road in Birmingham, but one that is hard to argue is full of nature.

1. Environmental regs
This is not about pitting nature against trams, just pointing out that you probably need less process and paperwork if laying tracks in urban areas on roads that already exist.

There was 3201 pages of assessment for the West Mids metro extension, on roads that look like this.

So why don't we build more? Five reasons, including the usual cast of characters from Britain’s long running national drama, Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?

1. Environmental regulations
2. Gold plating
3. We move too many utilities
4. British overcentralisation
5. DfT don't like them

Map of Birmingham showing how many people can reach the centre withing 30 minutes by bus. It's 0.9 million at peak time, 1.3m at off-peak time, and would be 1.7m all day (simulated) if there was a tram.

Chart showing relative productivity of UK cities compared to cities across the rest of Europe. While there are a few places in the SE that do well, the rest underperform second-tier cities in other countries. only six UK cities have a higher productivity than the European average. Half of UK cities are among the 25% least productive.

This makes it harder to get across big cities within a reasonable commute time. E.g. @tomforth.co.uk estimates only 0.9 million people can reach Birmingham city centre within 30 minutes by bus.

This limits agglomeration, so our second-tier cities underperform compared to the rest of Europe.

Chart showing the comparison between costs of building a mile of Tram track in the UK to other European Countries. It is £82 million in the UK, £47 million in France. Germany is cheapest at £24 million.

It costs us nearly twice as much to build a mile of Tram track in the UK as it does in Europe, so we don't have anywhere near as many trams.

Every French city with a population over 150,000 has a Mass Rapid Transit system. Only around a quarter of British place that size have one.

To grow the economy we need more trams, and fewer kebabs Britain’s second-tier cities are being held back by a simple problem, too many people still cannot get across them quickly enough to reach the jobs, customers and opportunities that drive growth.

Why do our second-tier cities underperform?
Why do we have fewer trams in the UK?

I try my best to give an answer to these two interconnected questions.

chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/to-grow-th...

With apologies, I haven't been posting much recently. Have just changed my settings so it nudges me to do so.

I try to explain why data quality is an increasing challenge for pollsters, and why this is a particular problem when it comes to "young men".

Key bit below on the lack of an incentive to fix it, and why YouGov aren't really the baddie here.

Young men, bad data and moral panic Before we build another national conversation around what young men supposedly believe, it is worth asking whether the data underneath it is any good.

After YouGov retracted their poll on young people going to church more, I wrote about why polling young people, especially young men, has become increasingly challenging.

It's a growing problem, and the market research industry needs to respond.

chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/young-men-...

It's a joke Chris

In fact it's second only to "Fluffy Chick: An Easter touch-and-feel book from the creator of Dear Zoo".

Although not all parents were happy, with one describing it as "repetitive" and that "A Toddler With Crayons Could Manage More Depth".

Reviews of Fluffy Bunny were more positive.

You can criticise Goodwin all you like, but he now has one of the bestselling fiction books in the country.

I don't understand why Peter Hitchens has a problem with us changing the clocks by just 4.167%.

Labour must not lose my generation of voters The defeat by the Greens in Greater Manchester demonstrates the danger of failing to address economic burdens

Labour cannot afford to write off the generations building Britain’s future.

If the Government cannot reforge the link between effort and reward, then young people will go elsewhere at election time.

@chriscurtis94.bsky.social

www.ft.com/content/53f6...

Labour must not lose my generation of voters The defeat by the Greens in Greater Manchester demonstrates the danger of failing to address economic burdens

UK governments have to stop treating young people "as the balancing item in every fiscal and political calculation and start rebuilding a deal in which effort is rewarded, housing is attainable and opportunity is not rationed by age."👏 @chriscurtis94.bsky.social

Labour must not lose my generation of voters The defeat by the Greens in Greater Manchester demonstrates the danger of failing to address economic burdens

"We can't keep loading costs on to this generation and expect them to turn up for us".

Excellent column by @chriscurtis94.bsky.social on why Labour needs a reset with younger people. www.ft.com/content/53f6...

Labour must not lose my generation of voters The defeat by the Greens in Greater Manchester demonstrates the danger of failing to address economic burdens

Have written for the @financialtimes.com about how decades of government policy has pushed integenerarional unfairness, and the political and economic cost of us not fixing it.

www.ft.com/content/53f6...

On financial insecurity and Labour's losses:

We showed in Feb 2025 Labour losing young insecure voters to Greens, mid-life/older to Reform: www.jrf.org.uk/public-attit...

And we explain how econ insecurity is a push factor, magnifying other reasons for vote losses: www.jrf.org.uk/public-attit...

Here @chriscurtis94.bsky.social tells the sequence, thinking and analysis actually behind ‘hero voters’, inc. how my research @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social on economic insecurity w/ @rosedegeus.bsky.social informed understanding of the economic basis of electoral coalitions pre-2024.

Who actually were the Hero Voters? Labour won in 2024 because of economically insecure voters, not social conservatism.

Have been a bit frustrated by some of the conversation about Labour's voter coalition.

I've written about who the "Hero Voters" actually were, how we won them, and what we need to do to earn their support next time.

chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/who-actual...

Great to see this issue getting attention from MPs.

But also: look mum! There I am, in Hansard!