The Department for Transport has rejected a funding bid for much-needed alterations to improve access for mobility-impaired people at Exeter St Thomas railway station.
The Great Western Railway station improvement funding application, for lifts and/or ramps at Teignmouth and Tiverton Parkway as well as Exeter St Thomas, was submitted to the Access for All funding programme two years ago but the government has only just announced the result.
None of the three stations were selected for funding under the scheme. Nor were any of the 73 stations granted government funding step-free access work in the past five years located in Devon.
Exeter St Thomas station access. Image: Jaggery under Creative Commons license.
The latest Devon funding bid failure was quietly announced by the Department of Transport shortly before 5pm on Friday afternoon, just as the holiday weekend began.
It published a list of 50 stations it said had been “selected for initial feasibility work” with a view to subsequent inclusion in the Access for All scheme.
The programme, which aims to fund structural changes to stations so that obstacles to access are removed, is over-subscribed and competitive. The department recently confirmed that it had added “confirmed support of the local MP” to its scheme selection criteria.
Whether this new criterion is connected to any correlation between the selection of stations for funding and the risk to the Conservative Party’s continuing tenure of the parliamentary constituencies in which the stations are located is unclear.
50 of 310 submitted bids were successful. Almost two-thirds of the funding went to stations in Conservative parliamentary constituencies. 26 of these - just over half the total - went to constituencies where the party risks losing the seat.
The risk ratings in the above table are based on survey data commissioned by Best for Britain during March 2024. The new parliamentary constituency boundaries were used.
The Survation survey results include a numerical “win probability” for each seat and for each party, on a scale from 0 (no chance) to 1 (near-certainty).
The table categorises the win probabilities in three groups:
- 0-0.3 win probability = High risk of a seat changing party
- 0.31-0.6 win probability = Medium risk of a seat changing party
- 0.61-1 win probability = Low risk of a seat changing party.
Meanwhile the low-key Department of Transport announcement, unaccompanied by the usual ministerial hype, is finding its way into news stories and political PR at constituency level, often in connection with the local MP.
A cursory search produces such results relating to Whitchurch and Ruabon, Ulverston, Stroud and Thirsk stations.
More such stories will doubtless soon appear as other MPs factor the good news into their election campaigns.
