One year ago today, during the Runcorn by-election, one of the key local issues was the tolls on the two Mersey crossings. Most residents of the Runcorn constituency qualify for a deeply discounted Local User Discount Pass from Halton Borough Council, but around 30% of voters, living in next door Cheshire West council, do not. Just before the election, a 20% toll hike landed on their doormat.
This was Reform UK’s second most prominent message on campaign literature, after immigration. Immigration is hard to fix in a by-election. Bridge tolls are not.
Ministers could have offered Halton Borough Council additional funding (around £1 million a year) to extend the discount to the four out-of-area wards- perhaps using the £45 million in grants Halton had to return to DfT in 20241, no legislation needed. It wouldn’t have changed the national picture, but it might have got seven votes.
If Labour had proposed this fix, they’d have received official advice warning of judicial review risk, how this would unfairly favour Runcorn and Helsby over Widnes or Chester, and how £1 million per year is too much to spend on a by-election giveaway. That advice would not have been wrong, it would be civil servants doing their jobs, highlighting the risks of policy change. But politicians and their advisors need to be doing a different job: weighing the risk of annoying DfT civil servants against the possibility of co-authoring the next chapter in the death of their government.
Our centralised system in the UK, and especially in England, has huge disadvantages. But, theoretically, it puts massive powers in the hands of Ministers that should allow them to solve problems quickly when brought to their attention. In reality Ministers are terrified to wield any of this power, whether in the national interest or in pursuit of their own political advantage.
This is not a one-off and long predates the current government. Michael Dnes has written about how every Reform gain in 2024 had a “missing road”. The most striking example is Great Yarmouth.
For decades, locals have campaigned for the Acle Straight to be dualled. It is a stretch of single carriageway between Great Yarmouth and Norwich where dozens of people have died and there are delays every single day. The case for upgrades to cut road deaths and journey times has been made again and again. Brandon Lewis was the MP from 2010 to 2024, and for most of that time, a government minister, often a full Cabinet attendee, notionally one of the most powerful people in the country. And the results of his interventions, of over a decade, seems to have amounted to a short, dismissive letter ghostwritten by a junior official telling him to go away. Processes were followed. Risks were managed. Stakeholders consulted. Nothing happened. Now the MP for Great Yarmouth is someone whose rhetoric on immigration is too spicy for Reform UK. Because establishment politicians preferred following the process, to fixing the road.
Excellent piece. It can be hard to win when you insist on doing things by the book against those who will promise anything.