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Northern voters need new transport links to make levelling up a reality

Times Red Box

Robert Largan MP, a committee member for Onward’s Levelling Up Taskforce, wrote for Times Red Box about our latest report, Network Effects. He writes:

“If we are to deliver on the vision the prime minister set out this week, we need to do things differently. We are spending £19 billion on transport investment this year alone, with more likely to be announced in the levelling up white paper and spending review in the coming weeks. That is a golden opportunity to reverse decades of regional divergence, and level up opportunity in the places where it has been lost.

“As Onward has shown, it is precisely in the places that the Conservatives need to focus our energies most politically — in towns and cities in the red wall of the north and the Midlands, as well as more rural parts of the southwest and Wales — that local transport connectivity is clearly holding places back.”

You can read the full piece here.

REPORT
Network Effects

New Onward dataset reveals for the first time how many jobs are reachable by car and public transport in every small local area in Britain - exposing a shocking transport gap between places.