What the Treasury’s New Green Book Means for South Yorkshire’s Growth

26th February 2026

HM Treasury’s updated Green Book shifts toward place-based growth and long-term impact. For South Yorkshire, this creates opportunity, as we explore what it means for transport, regeneration and investment.

At Nota Bene, we are a Sheffield based transport consultancy working closely with local authorities to develop robust transport strategies and business cases that unlock sustainable growth. Our focus is on ensuring that transport investment is grounded in strong evidence, aligned with wider economic objectives, and shaped around how places and communities actually function. We take a human-focused approach, making sure our analysis reflects not just models and metrics, but how people live, travel and access opportunity in practice.

What the Treasury’s New Green Book Means for South Yorkshire’s Growth

At Nota Bene, we work with places, public bodies and investors to shape credible economic strategies and business cases that unlock growth. Our focus is simple: helping regions make a strong, evidence-based case for investment that reflects how local economies actually function.

That’s why HM Treasury’s updated Green Book (February 2026) matters.

For those less familiar, the Green Book is the government’s official guidance on how public investment decisions are appraised. It sets out how departments assess whether projects, from transport schemes to regeneration programmes — represent good value for money. In practice, it plays a decisive role in determining which projects secure funding.

What has changed?

The 2026 update marks a notable shift.

Historically, decisions have often centred on a single headline metric: the benefit–cost ratio (BCR). While useful, this metric can narrow the focus of appraisal, particularly for projects whose wider economic and social impacts are harder to monetise.

The revised Green Book moves toward a more balanced approach. It places greater emphasis on:

Place-based analysis
Distributional impacts (who benefits, and where)
Long-term economic transformation
Consideration of both monetised and non-monetised impacts
Risk and uncertainty

In short, value for money is no longer presented as a single number, but as a broader judgement.

For South Yorkshire, this shift is significant.

Why this matters locally

The region’s growth ambitions rely on coordinated investment across transport, housing, skills and innovation. Major infrastructure schemes — such as potential tram extensions — are not simply about reducing journey times. They are about improving access to jobs, unlocking brownfield development, supporting labour market participation and enabling regeneration.

Encouragingly, the updated Green Book formally embeds place-based analysis within appraisal and requires sub-national impacts to be presented where relevant. It also aims to streamline processes, potentially reducing approval times and increasing certainty for developers and investors.

That direction of travel is positive. However, important practical questions remain.

The complexity of integrated growth

Treasury guidance rightly requires that appraisals demonstrate additionality, define a robust counterfactual and avoid double counting. But when projects are genuinely interdependent, for example, where transport investment unlocks housing growth, applying these principles becomes technically complex.

Without clear integration rules, there is a risk of either overstating combined benefits or understating transformational impacts.

There is also a governance challenge. Business cases remain anchored in departmental approval structures. Where a growth programme spans transport, housing and skills, multiple departments may still need to approve elements separately. This can lead to sequential approvals, repeated scrutiny and delays, increasing uncertainty for places trying to deliver coordinated growth.

The role of transport appraisal

The recently published Northern Appraisal Playbook (Transport for the North, February 2026) highlights why this debate is particularly important.

It confirms that travel time savings typically account for the majority of monetised benefits in transport business cases. As a result, they exert a strong influence on value-for-money conclusions.

The Playbook also recognises that current methods tend to favour longer-distance business travel and can understate the value of shorter urban journeys and time-pressured users.

In a compact city-region such as South Yorkshire, where improving local access to employment is central, this weighting can materially affect how schemes such as tram extensions are assessed.

The Playbook further questions assumptions that new jobs are largely displaced from elsewhere and highlights the difficulty of capturing housing and regeneration impacts within existing appraisal frameworks. In areas with underused labour, constrained viability and significant brownfield opportunity, projects risk being judged primarily on narrow transport efficiency metrics rather than their contribution to economic restructuring and place renewal.

A genuine opportunity, if applied well.

The reforms create a real opportunity for regions like South Yorkshire.

If major infrastructure proposals are framed and evidenced as part of integrated growth programmes, supported by robust analysis of accessibility, labour market participation and development delivery, they align strongly with the intent of the 2026 Green Book.

The key challenge is implementation. The framework now allows a broader story to be told. The task for places is to present that story with sufficient clarity and analytical discipline that it cannot be reduced to minutes saved.

For South Yorkshire’s business community, this matters. The way projects are appraised shapes the pace of regeneration, the certainty of infrastructure delivery and the region’s long-term competitiveness.

The Green Book has moved in a constructive direction. Ensuring that practice follows policy will be critical to unlocking the full growth potential of our city-region.