Thanks to the arrival of a "roads man" as transport minister, bypasses and motorway widening schemes are back on the agenda
Roads are all the rage again, and the roads lobby is suddenly resurgent. There is talk of a ten-year £20bn roads programme being announced in July, almost as big as Margaret Thatcher's £23bn plan, which was heralded in the 1989 white paper Roads to Prosperity. Bypass schemes are being dusted off, motorway widening is back on the agenda and construction firms are eagerly gearing up for a new roads bonanza.
The motoring lobby has already chalked up some fine victories. The Chancellor caved in to growing discontent at high petrol prices by granting a series of concessions to hauliers in the Budget and by abandoning the automatic 6 per cent rises in fuel tax duty. Tucked into the Budget speech, too, was the go-ahead for 44-tonne lorries. Those subscriptions to the British Roads Federation, which had long seemed a waste of money, suddenly look very good value indeed.
So what happened to integrated transport and the green transport agenda? They are still there, but, in that ghastly expression beloved of news editors who are reluctant to admit that your story is never going to see the light of day, they are on the back burner.
Sure, some remnants of the old policy survive. In July, a ten-year plan will be published with much fanfare, promising about £100bn worth of investment, much of it earmarked for the railways and new light rail schemes (which were out of fashion for a while, but have been revived). Transport will be a big winner in the Comprehensive Spending Review, with extra subsidies for train services and more money for loss-making bus routes. Treasury officials, through gritted teeth, have been privately hinting at a transport bonanza since last autumn, when the penny dropped at No 10 and Blair realised that the jokes about two-Jags Prescott masked a much more serious problem.
While some of this is good news for environmentalists, it is clear that a substantial slice of the investment (possibly even the £20bn suggested recently in the Independent on Sunday) will go to roads, and that any hint of fettering motorists and trying to combat the roads lobby full on has been lost from the agenda. We shall have investment in all modes of transport to tackle the chaos, but no coherent strategy or ideology. Pragmatism has taken over from radicalism, and the moment that this happened was when Gus Macdonald, the ennobled former TV mogul and union activist, was given the job of John Prescott's number two last autumn.
Tired of Prescott's inarticulate ramblings and his occasional disloyal public pronouncements, Tony Blair appointed Macdonald, who is seen as a fixer and a doer. Ultimately, transport politicians divide along pretty clear lines: they are either "roads men" (they are always men, pace Barbara Castle and Glenda Jackson) or "railways men". Macdonald is a roads man. He is sold on the old chestnut that roads are vital for economic progress, and he has been proselytising on this theme around Whitehall. Macdonald believes that the environmental problems generated by transport can be solved largely through technology - for example, cleaner and more fuel-efficient engines, which people feel less guilty about driving, and more sophisticated traffic management.
Prescott, who is a railways man, has been huffing and puffing in the department, but Macdonald now calls the shots because he has Blair's ear. The Prime Minister regretted the merger of transport and environment into one department because, he felt, transport was being run as an environmental issue rather than in the interests of travellers. Macdonald has reversed that. Labour's pledge to "reduce and then reverse traffic growth" is forgotten.
In fact, Labour frittered away its first three years on transport. When it took office, there was public consensus that, if more cars were allowed on to roads without restrictions, the result would be gridlock. Labour could have got public support for congestion charges in town centres and on motorways, as well as for taxes on workplace parking.
But as one frustrated insider put it: "Labour's transport policy has been an object lesson in how not to do politics." The inaction was the direct result of this government's desperate habit of trying to keep everyone inside the tent. So while ministers imposed a moratorium on new road schemes to satisfy the environmentalists, they did nothing else lest they antagonised the roads lobby. Talk of congestion charging was kept vague, and the power to implement it was devolved to local government. The Act allowing councils outside London to introduce charging schemes is only now going through parliament.
Because of Brown's caution on spending, there has been precious little transport investment. The voters, therefore, just see things getting worse, with little prospect of improvement. Transport has become a big negative factor with them. On a recent Sky TV phone-in programme on which I appeared, a poll of viewers voted 85 to 15 that Prescott's policies were a failure. But, although Blair blames Prescott for the mess, the responsibility rests firmly with the boys at No 10 - "teeny-boppers", as Prescott once called them - who made sure that any radical edge to Prescott's transport plans was removed. The white paper published in July 1998 was, therefore, strong on words but weak on action.
Now we shall have to relearn the lesson that big road-building schemes are an economic and environmental disaster. The government's own Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment reported last summer, with the rather unsurprising finding that while some projects were worthwhile, others were not. Such caution is being thrown to the wind. Two dozen "multi-modal" studies have been launched to examine bottlenecks in the transport system. The results will start being published in the autumn, but there are already fears that they will be used to justify the reinstatement of many scrapped road schemes.
Labour has made the analysis of road schemes a bit more sophisticated. Projects are supposed to be examined under five criteria - economy, environment, accessibil-ity, safety and integration. But economic benefit remains the biggest factor, and most of that comes from the savings in time reckoned to be made by those using the new transport facility. So road schemes tend to show more positive benefit than other schemes for transport improvement.
However sophisticated the analysis, transport boils down to political choices. But the July announcements will duck the choices again, trying to satisfy both the environmentalists and the roads lobby.
In this shambles, there are some compensations: at least the railways are likely to get a big increase in both revenue and capital support. But the great integrated transport experiment is dead. It was, in any case, a silly slogan. Nobody ever defined what it meant, except that local buses should connect with train services. In these days of privatisation and myriad owners, even that was difficult to achieve.
Eventually, the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions is also likely to be consigned to the dustbin of history. It is too unwieldy for one person to handle; and with Prescott now a lame duck, there is no reason for Blair to preserve it after the election. Prescott himself will live out his political days in some sort of sinecure as Leader of the House or, heaven help him, in the Cabinet Office, the job that has been the death of David Clark, Jack Cunningham and, before long, possibly Mo Mowlam, too.
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