There are expert government reports that quickly gather dust. There are reports that seem as if they will make a difference but are quietly forgotten about. There are reports that actually matter. And then there’s Beeching.
Even now, 56 years after its release, you don’t need to be a transport buff to know about the Beeching report. Following its publication in March 1963, hundreds of stations and thousands of miles of track were axed. The rail network was slimmed down on the grounds that many lines were underused and uneconomic.
Beeching came out in the year Harold Wilson made his “white heat of technology” speech. Its premise was that the car was the future and rail the past.
Cuts had been under way during the 1950s, and the feeling – exemplified by the Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt – was that railways were a legacy of the 19th century, of a pre-modern age.
When Wilson became prime minister a year later, there was no attempt to halt the closure programme.
Yet the history of the past half century shows that Beeching was a colossal mistake. Passenger numbers on trains are now higher than they were pre-1963 even though back then car usage was a lot lower. Beeching, in the words of his report, sought the “selective development and intensive utilisation of a more limited trunk route system” and that is broadly what Britain ended up with.
But the result has been a network where it is quick and easy to get by rail from Reading to London, and from Watford to London, but time-consuming to get from Reading to Watford. The motorway network reflects the fact that people often live in one town and work in another; the rail network does not.
But perhaps the most baleful legacy of Beeching has been the way in which it has led to towns and villages – often in the most economically challenged parts of the country – becoming isolated. Beeching contributed to the UK’s geographical divide between thriving big cities and struggling smaller towns. Without Beeching there might not have been a vote for Brexit.
Research by economists at the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE shows why. The 20% of places most exposed to rail cuts between 1950 and 1980s (some of which occurred before the Beeching report) have seen 24 percentage points less population growth than the 20% least exposed. There has also been a brain drain of young and skilled workers, and an ageing of the population.
What’s more, there was a double whammy because those parts of the country where the Beeching axe fell most heavily did least well out of the motorway expansion programme that was happening simultaneously. One sub-theme of the report was that buses could be expected to fill the gap left when the rail service ended, but this never really happened. Instead, the new roads went to the towns and cities that retained their rail connectivity.
The CEP research also noted that one byproduct of Beeching was that it became harder to make cross-country journeys without travelling into London. Generally, Beeching favoured lines running north-south over those running east-west, especially in the Midlands and the north of England. No question, his report contributed to the London-centric nature of the economy. And as the capital has got bigger so it has tended to grab a bigger share of what has been available for transport infrastructure spending. The them-and-us process has become self-reinforcing.
The cut-off state of once thriving industrial towns was well described by Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, in his capacity as chairman of the government’s Industrial Strategy Council, in a recent speech in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Haldane described how he arrived in the former mining community of Ashington, 15 miles north of the city. “When I visited Ashington, I arrived from Morpeth by taxi fairly late at night. This was the only way to get to the town. It was too late for the buses. And I had narrowly missed the last train from Newcastle by around 55 years, courtesy of Dr Beeching. He has been neither forgotten nor forgiven.”
The polarised state of British politics means there is precious little that unites remainers and leavers, but one thing on which there seems to be agreement is the need for investment to reverse the Beeching cuts for Ashington and many other places like it. Boris Johnson has pledged money for a faster line between Manchester and Leeds, while the former Labour transport minister and prominent remain supporter Andrew Adonis has said there is an overwhelming case for a systematic policy of reversing the worst mistakes of Beeching.
In some parts of the country that would be costly since the track has been pulled up and bridges dismantled. That objection does not apply everywhere, though. In Ashington, for example, there is a local campaign to restore passenger services to the freight-only line.
Adonis says a reverse Beeching programme could be kicked off with £5bn raised from the money saved from cancelling the M4 relief road, scrapping the £2.3bn plan to build an A303 tunnel under Stonehenge, and canning other pork barrel road schemes approved purely to win votes.
At present, money is no object for a government that has turned the spending taps full on, and there is hope for all rail restoration campaign groups. Eventually, though, the Treasury will start to count the pennies and ask whether it can afford to bring rail back to places that have not seen a passenger train in half a century. When it does, a simple question should be asked. Were the savings made by Beeching worth the social and economic costs? The answer is obvious.