Rest of UK receiving far more transport funding per passenger journey than London, Treasury figures show

More public transport passenger journeys have been taken annually in London in recent years than in the rest of the UK combined, yet the capital has received barely a third of the amount of national government transport funding given to the rest of England, Scotland and Wales, according to a Treasury analysis.

A breakdown of public expenditure compiled last July and presented to parliament, shows that while the capital received an average of £10 billion per annum over the financial years 2018/19 to 2022/23, for transport the rest of the country was given £29.7 billion – almost three times as much.

Yet an average of only 3.2 billion public transport passenger journeys a year were taken outside of London, compared with one of four billion in the capital – a figure 20 per cent higher over a period in which London received less than 34 per cent of the overall transport investment given to the rest of the UK.

The figures appear to contradict claims made by a think tank based in the North of England, and publicised today in a national newspaper, that the capital has been receiving more than its fair share of spending on public transport. That analysis uses calculations based on investment per head of resident population, rather than the number of people who actually make public transport journeys.

London’s public transport networks far more heavily used than those in other cities, both by its resident population of around nine million people and the million or more others who enter the capital daily, for work or leisure, and move around it by bus or rail.

For example, the London Underground’s Northern line is 36 miles long compared with the entirety of Manchester’s Metrolink at 64 miles, yet it supports 294 million passenger journeys a year compared with just 42 million for the whole of the Manchester network.

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