Transport 1 - Air

If Wales is to be an economic success then we must improve our transport infrastructure. This is essential for attracting new business investments, as well as enabling people to travel to work, and I will share my thoughts on road and rail improvements in other postings, but first of all I want to look at air travel.

It is a simple fact that international businesses need to have access to international travel and Wales is not well served in this area, and this will influence decisions on inward investment.
Our only airport in Cardiff has limited capabilities and is never going to compete with Heathrow. However it does have regular flights to Amsterdam, from where you can fly virtually anywhere in the world. We need to ensure that this service is maintained and increased in frequency, and providing a subsidy to KLM would be a far better use of our limited resources than supporting IeuanAir .

Passenger numbers have fallen at Cardiff Airport recently, and there is the danger of this becoming a vicious spiral – passengers don’t consider flying from Cardiff because there are only limited flights – then airlines reduce their flights because there are insufficient passengers and so on. So we need to do something to get more passengers using the airport by making it easier to use, which would then encourage operators to use the airport, and so achieve a critical mass as Bristol airport has achieved.
Cardiff Airport has very poor public transport links, with only one train/hour which needs to be reached by bus. But the Cardiff area already has an extensive railway network and it would be relatively simple (and low cost) to connect the Airport directly into this network. Currently, there are 5 trains per hour travelling between Cardiff Central and Barry. One of these trains continues past the Airport and on to Bridgend, while the other four continue to Barry Island where they terminate. I suggest that if a new spur of only around 1 km was built to connect the airport directly to the Vale of Glamorgan railway line, then two of the services currently terminating in Barry Island could be diverted instead to terminate at the airport.

This would massively improve the airports connectivity with a journey time to Cardiff Central of around 30 minutes and should lead to an increase in passenger numbers.

I estimate that this could be implemented for as little as £10 million, which is a fraction of the cost of the Welsh Government’s earlier plans to drive a new link road through open countryside to the M4. The road access to the airport still needs improving, but this should consist of on-line improvements to existing and otherwise planned roads such as the Dinas Powys by-pass.

But international travellers will still want to use the major airports at Heathrow (for south Wales) and Manchester (for north Wales) and we have to accept that, and ensure that access to these airports is improved, in particular by rail improvements.

It is currently difficult to reach Heathrow by train, involving a change at either Reading or Paddington. However, the new High Speed rail (HS2) plans will include a new station in West London at Old Oak which will also be served by intercity trains to south Wales, as well as Crossrail trains to Heathrow, and international services to Paris & Brussels. This new interchange together with electrification of the main line will significantly reduce journey times between south Wales and Heathrow but it is still not a direct access, and we should lobby for the proposed Heathrow Hub station to be built alongside the airport.
In the case of Manchester Airport, there are some services from north Wales, but these are very limited and not a realistic option. But a new international station is planned to be built as part of the HS2 plans, and we should lobby for new rail connections to be built to the west which would allow direct access to north Wales, as well as allowing high speed rail access to mainland Europe.