The contribution that transport can make to improving productivity, to supporting city regions and to improving air quality was highlighted in the budget today (22 November 2017).

Sue Percy, CIHT said:

“We welcome the budget statement today which again included a number of announcements that are of significant importance to CIHT.

We were pleased to see the transport fund for city regions and will be examining in more detail the content of this announcement. Whilst we await clarity on how this fund will work, we are conscious that a number of local authorities are already finding it difficult to dedicate the resources needed to take part in any competitive bidding for funds.

CIHT are working with the government on ensuring we have the necessary skills in the sector to deliver the infrastructure outlined in previous statements. We welcome the added investment in students taking maths and further maths at A-level.

We are looking forward to the Industrial Strategy announcement next week which we hope will continue to show the important role that transport and infrastructure will play in the development of the UK economy.”

Key highlights included:

Forecasts

The Office for Budget Responsibility has cut its forecasts for UK economic growth.
The UK economy is now expected to grow by 1.5% in 2017, a downgrade from the 2% forecast made in March.
Growth has also been cut to 1.4% in 2018, 1.3% in both 2019 and 2020, before picking back up to 1.5%, and finally 1.6% in 2022.
Chancellor sets aside £3bn for Brexit preparations, in addition to existing £700m.

Funding for infrastructure

Philip Hammond has spoken about the National Productivity Investment Fund, which provides an additional £23bn billion of investment over five years to upgrade the UK's economic infrastructure for this century.
The fund will be extended for another year and expanded to be worth more than £31bn.
He adds: "We are allocating a further £2.3 billion for investment in R&D (research and development) and we’ll increase the main R&D tax credit to 12%."
This, he says, will take "the first strides towards the ambition of our industrial strategy to drive up R&D investment across the economy to 2.4% of GDP".

Putting power into electric vehicles
‘Our future vehicles will be driverless but they will be electric first’. The chancellor unveils extra funds and tax incentives for electric car drivers. That includes a new £400m charging infrastructure fund, an extra £100m in Plug-In-Car Grant, and £40m for research into charging.

Training and education
Further £20m for T-Level.

Importance of local transport

New £1.7bn Transforming Cities Fund – to fund local transport priorities.

Full details of Budget see:  https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-treasury