Louise Haigh plans to focus on poorer areas, healthy methods, and ability to ‘tap in and tap out seamlessly’

Transport across towns and cities could become integrated using dedicated apps, with investment focused on poorer areas and healthier methods, as part of what ministers are calling a “people-first” revolution in local travel.

Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, described the plans in a speech in Leeds as “a revolution to wrestle back power over transport”. She said powers would be heavily devolved to mayors and councils across England, who would be encouraged to devise their own priorities.

One idea could be allowing towns and cities to use “surge” or dynamic pricing to make parking more expensive when pollution levels are high, an idea used in the French city of Dijon and cited by Haigh as an example of properly linked, tech-focused travel.

Announcing changes to the way transport projects are assessed by government, Haigh said the new metrics would prioritise economic growth and productivity, and would inevitably be targeted more at areas with poor transport connectivity, such as the north of England. Other changes would favour healthier travel modes.

Haigh presented the strategy as a radical shift away from an infrastructure-heavy “Whitehall knows best” approach, saying transport policy had too often ended up being “a series of bin fires by being tackled by men – hobbyists who really, really love trains”. She added: “But that’s not me. I don’t have a model railway in my attic.”

Speaking to reporters after the speech, Haigh said that as well as investing in transport networks such as buses and local trains, and allowing local areas to set their priorities, the use of tech to connect often disparate system could be “really transformative”.

Using the example of Dijon, where a central app provides information, ticketing and payment for public transport, hire bikes and car parking, Haigh said people should be able to “tap in and tap out seamlessly across different modes of transport”, with the confidence that these would also have integrated timetables.

She pointed to another policy used in Dijon, where municipal parking prices are changed depending on pollution. The direction is not always upwards, with charges sometimes dropped very low amid a spike in pollution to encourage people to leave their cars in town and get public transport home.

“It’s just about having those levers and the ability and the resource at the local level to really design a very unique and specific network to your circumstances,” she said.

Asked if the change in the weighting for the approval of new projects would inevitably see money shift from areas like the south-east of England to the north and elsewhere, Haigh confirmed this was the case.

“If you overlaid the areas of the country that were most economically inactive, it would also be these areas that are least well connected,” she said. “So making sure that we drive investment and prioritise the growth agenda for people that have been historically underserved by that investment is what’s going to really get Britain growing and working.

“We want to get to a place where we are making the investment in our transport much fairer across the country. It’s not historically been fair, and the north of England in particular has been really badly served, and that is partly why we’ve got such a huge productivity gap across the country.”

Haigh’s department is seeking input from local areas before releasing a fuller strategy next year, billing this as genuine engagement rather than a traditional consultation in which ministers hear views and then decide what they think is best.

There would not, she told reporters, be any new local tax-raising powers to pay for transport schemes, but councils and mayoralties could look at ways to get more investment from the private sector, such as parking levies.

Too many people across England had become inured to inconvenient journeys, Haigh said: “They accept that transport simply doesn’t work and it won’t meet their needs.”

This, she added, made her department crucial in making voters who felt ignored or marginalised less likely to seek answers from populist parties such as Reform: “I do think that just delivering on the basics, which is what transport is to so many people, is a really important way to demonstrate that government is working.”