Congratulations to Alistair Baldwin, who was one of the TPS bursary winners from 2019, and has just completed a study for the Institute for Government (IfG) on 'How Governments use evidence to make transport policy'.  His July 2020 blog for TPS on “Climate Ethics in Transport Planning: A far away country of which we know little?” is on https://tps.org.uk/transport-planning-day-and-campaign/read-our-blogs/tps-bursary-series-2020climate-ethics-in-transport

As part of the IfG study Alistair interviewed practitioners including the TPS Skills Director and reaches some interesting and highly relevant conclusions.  These include:

• DfT should publish the strategic and economic case for every project that it funds, including making BCRs indexed and searchable
• DfT should pursue more secondments to/from local government to ensure civil servants have experience of delivery and help develop local skills
• DfT should consider updating National Policy Statements and a new strategy covering different modes of transport
• Funding for evaluations should come from revenue funds, be ring-fenced and provided to local areas

This adds to the work done by the Treasury Green Book Review team and ongoing input from the professional bodies joint initiative to reform transport appraisal.  The full IfG report is on:

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/evidence-transport-policy.pdf