West Yorkshire Combined Authority is responsible for delivering the schemes. Leeds City Council is working in partnership with the West Yorkshire Combined Authority. The Combined Authority works with Local Authorities and businesses across West Yorkshire and York to create economic growth through large and small scale infrastructure projects such as this.
Monies from Leeds City Council and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority of £8.800m and £0.966m respectively will increase the funding to £183.266m. The programme also includes private sector finance including expenditure on more environmentally friendly buses by bus operators bringing the total programme investment to over £270m.
Following consideration of the submission, the Department approved the programme on 21 April 2017. The main conditions of the grant from the DfT are that the funding is to be used for public transport improvements in Leeds which must be substantially complete by March 2021. More information about those transport improvements can be found at: https://www.leeds.gov.uk/parking-roads-and-travel/connecting-leeds-and-transforming-travel/
Can the money be spent on other things? (e.g. bus services, other projects)
This scheme has funding allocated to it as part of the Connecting Leeds programme and therefore the funding will not be able to be spent on any other proposals or scheme. If the Combined Authority does not accept the business case, then the scheme cannot go ahead and the money put aside for this project will be reallocated elsewhere in the Connecting Leeds programme.
What engagement/feedback has already been done? How are you engaging with the public, businesses and stakeholders?
In 2016 we started a conversation with people who live and work in Leeds about the future of transport in the city. We had more than 8,000 responses, with a clear message that improvements need to be made to public transport.
A number of schemes were identified from this transport conversation and some small scale engagement took place through the Leeds Community Committees. Since then, local ward members have reviewed the refined list of schemes located in their areas.
We are now at the next stage in developing these local schemes and residents, businesses and the general public are now being given an opportunity to comment on the proposals.
An Expression of Interest for funding to investigate locations to improve local waiting facilities and information provision was approved in 2017. This provided around £80,000 of funding to develop the project to the Outline Business Case stage (OBC). The OBC develops preliminary designs, undertakes traffic modelling work to determine a preferred option and estimates scheme costs, risk etc.
The OBC was submitted to the Combined Authority’s assurance process in March 2019 and approved in May 2019. The project is now being developed to Full Business Case (FBC) stage which includes detailed design and public engagement. The FBC is expected to be submitted to the assurance process later in 2019, where approval to tender for the works will be made.
