Prosperity has many parents. At a local level, growing prosperity has a lot to do with access: how easily people can connect with employment and training opportunities, or visit places where they can spend the cash that is the lifeblood of every retail, leisure and tourism business.
Where travel seems challenging, people with reduced mobility tend to be unwilling to take it on. So for communities there’s a clear economic driver behind Access for All (AfA) programmes – they increase connectivity with multiple factors that help generate growth. That’s why effective community engagement is a critical success factor in every scheme.
As an aside, one fairly immediate and obvious boost to local economies can come from the AfA enhancement works themselves. Programmes can and should make delivering social value a priority – for example by supporting and developing local supply chains and investing in community facilities.
Skills and Growth
Skills play a vital role in supporting economic growth. Conversely, skills shortages are a major brake on the economy, as recent research illustrates. This is an issue that affects transport as well as education policy.
UK employers report that over a third of UK vacancies in 2022 were due to skills shortages. By contrast, during the period 2013 to 2017 skills-shortage vacancies (SSVs) remained stable at around 22% (Skills England: Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities 2024).
Studies have consistently highlighted the importance of skills for economic growth. Around one third of average annual UK productivity growth between 2001 and 2019 has been attributed to an expansion of skills available in the workforce (DfE: Skills and UK Productivity 2023).
In reality, many of those skills were imported from former EU partners rather than home-grown, and that avenue is closed for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, people with disabilities and mobility issues remain under-represented in the workforce.
Access to Opportunities
From the perspective of improving prosperity through more inclusive public transport there are two key aspects: enabling more people with disabilities to travel to employment opportunities with greater ease, and enabling more people to access education and training opportunities to acquire the skills businesses need.
More accessible transport through AfA schemes is clearly only part of the jigsaw. It’s also a pretty fundamental one and arguably the part that helps everything else work.
Access our AfA resource area below to find out more.
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By signing up, you’ll gain access to our resource hub, designed to support rail operators, designers and project teams in delivering successful Access for All (AfA) projects.
Access valuable resources, including:
- Proven Practices: Practical guides on AfA project management to improve efficiency, reduce costs and achieve sustainable outcomes.
- Regulatory Guidance: Clear insights into compliance requirements to ensure your projects meet the highest standards of accessibility and safety.
- InnovateUK Report Summary: Detailed findings on the future of accessible and inclusive rail travel in the UK.
- House of Commons Report Overview: An overview of the legislative framework for AfA, including its alignment with the Equality Act 2010.
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