There is no timeline about when work will start, or a date when that will be announced
There is currently no date for when rail improvements promised by the UK Government will start, nor any indication of where the first works will take place. In the UK Government’s spending review last month, the main announcement for Wales was a £445m rail funding boost.
The Treasury’s paperwork said the following was being promised: “£300m for rail investment in Wales, including for the Burns Review stations, North Wales Level Crossing, Padeswood Sidings and Cardiff West Junction.
“This [spending review] and the upcoming 10-year infrastructure strategy will recognise Wales’ long-term infrastructure needs and will deliver at least £445m of rail enhancements to realise them.”
But in terms of what will be delivered and when there was no more detail available then. In the following days we had tried to get details from the Welsh secretary, the Department for Transport, and the Treasury about what would take place when and exactly what the money was to be spent on. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
The best we could get was from the Department for Transport (DFT). “We will be working with industry partners such as Network Rail and Transport for Wales in the coming months to agree the programme of further work to deliver the investment. This work will update will confirm the costs and delivery schedule for the overall programme,” we were told.
Neither Network Rail nor Transport for Wales were able to give details and our questions were directed to the Welsh Government’s transport minister, Ken Skates and our repeated requests to sit down with him to ask questions have also been unfulfilled.
During a session of the Commons’ Welsh Affairs committee on Thursday Welsh secretary Jo Stevens was asked by the committee chair Ruth Jones MP to explain the plans.
“In terms of what we’re going to do and where we’re going to do it and the order in which we’re going to do it that will now be the discussion between the Wales Rail Board and DFT.
“They will produce the information that will set out the projects, the order in which they will be done, and the timelines for them.
“I think that’s absolutely right because obviously the Welsh Rail Board has produced the priority list that went into the spending review to get that money They’ll now look at how how it is delivered.”
She was then asked by Mrs Jones if there was a “timeline for their timeline” and the Welsh secretary said there was not.
She added: “Not that I’m aware of. I know that work is starting on it pretty imminently and so I would hope it would not be too long because now we’ve got the funding secured, we’ve got to get on with delivering it.
“But what we do have is the advantage that the projects that you referred to, for example, the Burns report, the changes on the North Wales mainline, to remove level crossings, to increase capacity, Padeswood Sidings – that’s really exciting as that problem has been there for decades and finally we’re going to be able to deal with it – those are really important projects but they’re all projects that have gone through the kind of development work and are now ready for delivery.
“At the same time that we would be doing the development work on other projects that will come after this three-year spending review period.”
Ms Stevens told the committee that Wales will get just over £200m as a consequence of announcements made in English mayoral areas just before the spending review. You can read about that here.
