Why there's quite some way to travel

Nov 9 2009 by Kevin Rowan , The Journal

A VERY small number of people in the region enjoy the luxury of being able to determine the time at which they start and finish their working day. This is largely confined to senior management or directors, or those who benefit from working for an employer who has fully embraced smarter working principles and practices.

For the vast majority of workers these times are fixed, meaning they endure the peak travel congestion on their way to and from work.

While the North East doesn’t endure anything like the same travel chaos that other regions and major cities experience, the Eddington Report of a few years ago did show that the peaks of travel congestion, in the morning and evening, rose faster and relatively further than elsewhere.

The impact on journey times is plain to see, my own experience means a difference of 25 minutes at a quiet time, to 45 minutes at the peak periods.

Compared to other parts of the UK the North East doesn’t fare too badly in terms of the time workers spend commuting; our average commuting time is just 47 minutes. Only Wales and the South West have lower commute times.

Factors affecting this time do provide some explanation.

The North East is a geographically small region – you can cover the distance between the two city regions in that average commute time on a good day – and it is unusual for workers living here to travel to work in other regions.

Secondly, there is a very low propensity to travel very far to work anyway,.

Thirdly, income and occupation is, perhaps obviously, the key determinant. There are many more professional and senior executive occupations in other regions, where pay is also much higher than it is in the North East. Workers here aren’t just reluctant to travel; commuting is relatively more expensive for relatively low waged workers in this region than it is elsewhere.

Managers, senior officials and professionals’ commuting time is on average two thirds more than that of more elementary occupational workers.

In ‘Commute Smart Week’ (today to Friday) concentration should be focused, on measures than can reduce those peak congestion periods, such as staggering starting times and enabling workers to work from home more.

The travel to work profile of the North East does highlight some underlying structural challenges for us too. Improving the occupational profile and wage levels in the region remains a fundamental challenge which will hopefully be at the core of the next Regional Strategy.

Kevin Rowan is Regional Secretary, Northern TUC