Limbostructure

What is stopping Leeds getting a tram?

Will Leeds ever get a tram? If you’d asked me up until Summer last year, I would have answered that it was a racing certainty. After all, DfT had handed all the development money to mayors; was singing the praises of integrated transport; and had even rewritten its investment processes to centre on a panel with Tom Forth on it. Mayor Tracy Brabin had staked her reputation on starting construction by 2028. When the based-but-careful Dan Tomlinson posted a thread setting out the strength of the case, I thought it was in the bag.

This does not scream ‘maybe’

But I was wrong. In December, the project was put back by years, so it couldn’t open until the late 2030s. At Easter we learnt more – that the government’s infrastructure acceleration unit NISTA had said the business case wasn’t ready enough. Not only did they want another 2-3 years of assessments, but they even wanted to see a first-principles test of why the project couldn’t just be a bus instead.¹

The question a lot of people seem to be asking is ‘how can this happen?’ In a government elected on a promise to build fast, and with every intention of building this very specific project, how is this slipping away?

Well, I can help with that. Because this project is far from alone – allow me to introduce you to the world of limbostructure. And let’s start by chasing a helicopter.

South of the border

There are some projects which local people just know we ought to build. If you’re in the North East, the go-to example is the A1 from Newcastle to Edinburgh. A road that is an eight-lane motorway in John Major’s old constituency unravels into a single-carriageway road with a poor safety record once you get north of Morpeth.

So in 2014, government promised action. David Cameron descended by chopper, like the Angel of the South East, and announced that government would bring forward 13 miles of dualling – enough to link together all the existing dualled section into a continuous modern highway. Not enough to get to Edinburgh, but a big start; and welcomed even by his critics. It would, he promised, be in construction by 2020.

Don’t go up there looking for it, though – because in 2026 not only is the scheme not built; it’s been cancelled.

That should surprise you, because every single Prime Minister between Cameron and Starmer has said this thing should be built. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both promised to dual it. Boris said dual more of it, and even rebranded Highways England as National Highways with a mind to take it over the border. When Dominic Cummings wrote about attracting misfits and weirdos, he wanted them specifically to supersize this project. If you look to the right of the photo above you will see Anne-Marie Trevelyan. She made her political career calling for the dualling of this stretch of road and ended up as Transport Secretary, determined to make it start.² Even Keir Starmer got in on the act in 2023, when he said the lack of progress was “a metaphor for how the country has been run over the last 13 years.” Unfortunately, that took on a double meaning after the election, when his transport secretary cancelled the project altogether.

But there’s another reason for this being a surprise: the project had secured planning permission back in 2021. It wasn’t being blocked by process, or by legal challenges. In legal terms, this was shovel-ready. The Secretary of State just needed to send a letter, which they are supposed to do within three months. Instead, it took more than three years; and only landed two weeks after the general election had been called.

The reason for this was a mystery to outsiders, until the real problem was revealed by a leak last year. Just as all those politicians were promising action, Treasury officials had secretly cancelled the scheme in 2021. The project team was stood down, leaving just a webpage and a skeleton crew. There was no money; which means ministers were unable to sign a letter unbinding the shovels. And when Labour came to power, the choice was not carry on vs cancel, but should government spend half a billion extra here at the same time as it was reviewing winter fuel payments.

Starmer and Sunak and Truss and Johnson were all promising something that deep government had decided it didn’t want to build. And deep government won.

The room where it (doesn’t) happen

I call this limbostructure: projects that government has promised to deliver, but are not really progressing. There’s a lot of it about. National Highways is just finishing off the A63 Castle Street – a project promised in 2002. The new Road Investment Strategy promises to start only five new projects between now and 2031, of which two³ began development under the Brown government. On paper, the typical start-to-finish on a complex infrastructure project should be about ten years; in practice it’s edging closer to 25. The Leeds tram itself is on its third pass, despite having secured full planning powers in 1994.

Surely, I hear you thinking, five prime ministers are enough to break through this kind of deadlock? Clearly not. A PM’s endorsement is a shining, wonderful thing. But it bears very little relationship to the practical business of advancing a project day-by-day. This grey, dull process is of no interest to the wider world – and is therefore entirely beyond (or should that be below) politics.

This is a process of drafting business cases, project documents, consultation exercises, options sifting, extra consultations, redesigns, appraisals, risk meetings, funding boards and so, so much more. It’s a battle of snores between project teams, trying to deliver the project entrusted to them, and external forces that have no great interest in seeing them succeed, but absolutely do not want them causing wider trouble. And both sides categorise politicians primarily as a risk.

The crucial thing about limbostructure is that both sides have an incentive to delay, and therefore give the other side a licence to do so. Project teams want to de-risk, and don’t want to be held to hard deadlines for fear of errors under pressure. The centre would much rather throw in an extra bit of process than deal with the consequences of unwise action. And both sides would be much happier if the tricky bits of the promise vanished into the mists of time.

Sometimes we call it Treasury Brain; sometimes we call it consultationitis; sometimes we call it “allowing time for more effective programme sequencing”. What it always means is putting off for tomorrow what was promised for yesterday.

When this reaches a Prime Minister, or even a junior minister, it’s too late to do anything about it. They might give a frosty glance to whoever is holding things up,⁴ but they’re hardly about to recalculate the benefit-cost ratio. Provided the concern is anchored in a technical consideration, it can’t easily be challenged and politicians aren’t given the option of overruling it.

Mountains no barrier

But let me give you hope: because it is possible to escape limbo. Remember how the A1 dualling was cancelled because it was a costly road project in the north of England with poor value for money? Well, let me introduce you to the A66 – a road project in the north of England that is poor value for money and costs three times as much as the A1 scheme. And which starts construction later this year, having survived the same conditions.

It’s one of the most inspiring bits of infrastructure the country is building. A lot of people have missed this scheme amidst all the general gloom, but we haven’t had a new lane of road or railway track from one side of the Pennines to the other since the 1970s. It was first promised in 1946; and now we’ve got there. It will improve journeys as far afield as Glasgow, Belfast and Dover. And on the poor value for money, the DfT’s official position is lets go!

I suspect this sounds a lot closer to the approach many of my readers would like to see for infrastructure. What do you think made the difference?

Well, it’s not the number of Prime Ministerial endorsements – that’s about the same.⁵ But it was a lot more street smart than the A1.

By way of background, government promises to dual a lot of long roads, and normally, that promise falls through. For example, in 2014 there was a promise to dual the A303, starting with the Stonehenge Tunnel. The project was split into seven segments, and as soon as one fell over on its own, the house of cards collapsed. Dualling the A66 was promised on a similar basis in the 2000s, and eight segments ended up being cut down to a single three-mile bypass.

But this time, something different happened. Here, the project was set up as a single, coherent plan that demanded that every gap in the dual carriageway between the M6 and the A1(M) should be filled to create a coherent route.

And behind it was a very bloodyminded official, who wanted this project to happen and was playing to win. So for all of the years of early development, when people began saying ‘oh, it’s a bit big; perhaps we should split it up’, he shut them down hard. There was no point to crossing half a mountain range, he pointed out. Either were here to do the full job, or we should shut the whole project down as a waste of money. And nobody felt bold enough to call for that.

This sounds like it’s a trivial debating point, but it was decisive. Because as the project filled out, that little extra sense of purpose meant the whole system began to work harmoniously. That purpose was baked into the business case, into the construction planning and the stakeholder engagement. When Treasury wanted cuts, they skipped over this project because they saw it as delivering a national-level benefit that they considered important. When the fact the project was poor value for money could no longer be ignored, the Accounting Officer could sign it off saying that the strategic benefits more than made up for the shortfall in calculated value.

The project stopped being a problem, and became a testbed to work in new, more efficient ways. It even became the posterchild for the government’s Project Speed for accelerating infrastructure.⁶

So don’t let anyone tell you that the Green Book makes it impossible to approve a multi-billion-pound northern project, in a fiscal crunch, with a BCR of under one. In fact, the friction within the system was so small, that one individual was enough to counter it.

Yes means yes

I choose to remember this story as an inspiration. But maybe the accurate assessment is that one individual, making one well-timed point, is worth more than the power of five prime ministers.

To state the obvious, that’s not an accountable system. Especially since those individuals, making their powerful choices, are rarely aligned to deliver like the person driving forward the A66.

So in Leeds, I think politicians need to ask themselves a question: are we building a tram or not? If the answer is ‘not sure’, then the current system serves them very well – it gives PhD-length periods for philosophical reflection. But if there is a consensus that Leeds shouldn’t be the largest city in western Europe without a light rail system, and that this is indeed holding back the economy of West Yorkshire, someone needs to get to those well-buried discussions and make clear that yes means yes.

If you want an incentive, try this: the Leeds Tram is priced at £2.5bn. The first attempt at a tram, in the 1990s and early 2000s, was cancelled as too expensive for costing only £390m – about £700m in today’s money. If the council had been allowed to borrow the cost and paid 7% interest on the loans every year, they’d have saved a billion pounds compared to the current plan.

Or, to switch back to roads, DfT’s last accounts write off the cost of eight limbostructure projects that the government cancelled after the election – worth a total of £472m. Given there’s at least one more large project yet to be added to the tally, this will end up being more than half a billion pounds spent delivering absolutely nothing.⁷

Limbostructure doesn’t build political legitimacy; it doesn’t help the country and it really isn’t cheap. But even one person in the right place at the right time can keep a project out of it. The question for us as citizens is how to make sure the right person is there when it counts.

1. Causing Labour Growth Group head Chris Curtis to coin the anagram ‘CIBAB’ - Can It Be A Bus - to describe pointless strategic reassessments.

2. In the Truss administration, so she only lasted 45 days. It’s as if she wished for the job on a cursed monkey’s paw.

3. A38 Derby Junctions and M54/M6 Link Road

4. Particularly for the Leeds Tram, which has been undone by an organisation whose stated mission is about imbuing strategic purpose, ending underinvestment and stopping instability.

5. Indeed Rishi Sunak was a local MP - I have photos of him campaigning beside it from before his first election, and Keir Starmer used Sunak’s last PMQs to gently mock his support for it.

6. Please don’t tell anyone the opening date was meant to be 2027.

7. And that’s before anyone mentions the Lower Thames Crossing. Knowing the projects and their histories, 90% of this loss would have been avoided were it not for missteps or slow-pedalling.