Election 2019: What the Green Party is saying about travel

The Green Party has unveiled its manifesto for the general election on 12 December 2019. These are the key points on transport and travel.

Mission statement

“A public and sustainable transport revolution, which will allow people to travel cheaply and safely on new trains, buses, cycleways and footpaths.”

Key ideas

Creating a nation in which “wherever people live they are not forced to use a car”.

Pedestrians and cyclists would benefit from a staggering £285,000 an hour spent on new cycleways and footpaths, “built using sustainable materials, such as woodchips and sawdust”.

The Green Party would make travelling by public transport cheaper than travelling by car by reducing rail and bus fares.

The party promises to renationalise the railways within a decade, and to bring about: “A new golden age of train [sic] by opening new rail connections that remove bottlenecks, increase rail freight capacity, improve journey times and frequencies, enhance capacity in the South West, Midlands and North, and connect currently unconnected urban areas.

“Coach travel will also be encouraged, with new routes for electric coaches provided across the country.”

That’s the carrot. The stick is reserved for airline passengers.

Domestic flights will immediately be 20 per cent more expensive due to losing their exemption for VAT. “There will be an additional surcharge on domestic aviation fuel to account for the increased warming effect of emissions release [sic] at altitude,” the Green manifesto says.

A Frequent Flyer Levy would apply to anyone who makes more than one round trip every year. The aim is to “reduce the impact of the 15 per cent of people who take 7 per cent of flights”.

“The doomed HS2 rail line” will be scrapped, say the Greens, and instead the money will fund “three electrified rail lines running from Liverpool and Manchester to Sheffield, Hull and the Tees Valley”. 

All plans for airport expansion, including the planned third runway for Heathrow, will be scrapped.

UK tourism

“We will also encourage more domestic holiday travel, through removing VAT from UK hotel and holiday home stays and attractions.”

Independent analysis

The prospect of the Greens forming a government, or even holding a controlling stake in a coalition, looks remote. Yet over the years the Green Party has seen a number of initiatives picked up by mainstream political parties, so these ideas deserve close attention.

The concept of “a new golden age of train” implies there was an original golden age of rail – presumably the 1920s, the last time passenger numbers were almost as high as they are now. The UK was far better connected by rail before the swingeing Beeching cuts of the 1960s, but steam traction was appallingly bad for air quality.

Ask nine out of 10 rail experts and they will say that the best fix to “remove bottlenecks, increase rail freight capacity, improve journey times and frequencies” is to build HS2. The principle purpose of the link from London via Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds is capacity, not speed. The plan to switch freight from road to rail looks pretty hopeless on the East Coast and West Coast main lines, unless passenger trains are to be cut back – exactly the reverse of what the Greens want to do.

Certainly rail travellers in southwest England and Wales deserve more investment in services. A single excellent trans-Pennine link is currently the plan of Northern Powerhouse Rail; building three such routes looks a touch wasteful. 

On aviation, the clamour is growing for taxation on aviation fuel. The Greens’ plan for a Frequent Flyer Levy is less popular, and raises many questions. One is: why someone who wants to fly a couple of round-trips from the UK to Spain on an efficient airline such as easyJet or Ryanair should be penalised more than a first-class traveller to New Zealand and back?

Furthermore, it is not clear whether the levy will apply to travellers from overseas flying to and from Britain. And one likely unexpected consequence: to encourage more wasteful journeys, typically taking Eurostar to Paris or Amsterdam for an onward flight, to dodge the penalties.

Scrapping VAT on UK hotel and holiday home stays, and tourist attractions, would be welcomed by the British inbound tourist industry – as would cancelling Brexit. Leaving the European Union jeopardises tourism arrivals from Europe as well as staffing for many tourism enterprises.