The biggest ever investment in North East public transport will see the Tyne & Wear Metro modernised over the next decade. Bernard Garner, director general of Nexus, explains why that is good news for the whole region.

WINNING £580m inward investment for North East England sounds like an historic achievement in its own right, but let me tell you about a far bigger number.

The Government funding announcement for Metro made in February is actually worth at least £2.5 billion pounds over the next decade.

That’s the impact that Nexus, the public body which owns and manages Metro, calculates our investment will have on the region’s economy as it emerges from recession.

It comes in a number of ways. Metro’s future is now secure and that means it can continue to do what it has been doing brilliantly for 30 years – helping create a more flexible workforce by allowing people to travel further and quicker for jobs and training than would otherwise be the case.

Metro carries 40 million passengers a year and relieves congestion – taking an estimated 15 million car journeys off our roads each year – and fuels town and city centre economies.

Around 10,000 trips a day into the centre of Newcastle are made purely because Metro is there to make the journey easy.

All that is now safe, but that’s just the start. Most of the money, almost £400m pounds once local contributions are included, will be spent on the Metro: all change modernisation programme over the next 11 years (the remainder will help meet Metro’s operating subsidy after fares).

If you want to see what this means then I suggest you pay a visit to Haymarket. If you compare it to its neighbouring stations in central Newcastle you can see the massive change we can bring.

Sunderland station, where we are investing £7m – our biggest ever station modernisation project – is another example.

Imagine that same step-change in quality applied not just to stations all over Metro – 12 including Central in the first four years alone – but to its entire fleet of trains, to information systems and to the way people buy tickets. All that is now in the pipeline.

In the next two years you will see a new generation of ticket machines providing a full range of purchase options. These will include ‘smartcard’ travel along the lines of London’s Oyster card and credit/debit card purchase. You’ll still be able to pay with humble notes and coins, but you’ll also be able to buy them online.

Metro was designed in the 1970s and still bears the hallmarks of that era. Just as you wouldn’t put up with driving around in a Ford Cortina today, we want a public transport system that offers real choice and competition to the modern car.

And delivering our vision creates new opportunities throughout the region’s construction, engineering and technology sectors, as well as within our existing supply chain.

Almost 200 companies, most from within the region, attended a fact-finding event we held last September to introduce our capital programme and we will be following up with more information about the procurement routes we will be taking as we plan our investments in detail this year.

It all adds up to an unprecedented funding boost secured at a time when public spending in general is under real pressure. The Government has been bold in showing the value it places on sustainable transport and a low-carbon future.

The whole region stands to benefit from that.