Taking stock after the rush to spend some ‘sustainable’ money

The DfT’s Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) ostensibly opened for business at the start of the 2011/12 financial year but, since the successful applicants for funding weren’t actually given the money until last summer, many local authorities report a frantic rush to spend the first year’s worth of cash in barely half a year.

The rules governing disbursement of LSTF grant are, at first sight, relatively straightforward. Each sum allocated to a local authority for each financial year of the four-year funding stream must be spent in that year, or returned to the DfT. There is some flexibility, in that funding can be moved from one project to another, provided that all of the capital funding stays in the capital pot, and all the revenue funding in the revenue pot. But that’s about as far as it goes, meaning that...

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