Handley Stevens

Competition and Investment

The policy of the Conservative governments between 1979 and 1997 was to use market forces to improve the delivery of transport services — driving down fares, costs, charges and subsidies and increasing the quantity and quality of investment — by releasing it from the restraints of public-sector control. Competition has been increased in the provision of air, bus, rail and road freight services. The regulatory arrangements have been adjusted accordingly to secure the public interest within the new structures. This chapter assesses the extent to which these goals have been attained, particularly in road and rail transport.

Sources of Finance

When Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government came to power in 1979 the road haulage industry and private vehicles were paid for by the private sector, as was shipping and much of the civil aviation industry; but large parts of the transport sector — buses and trains, roads and railways, ports and airports — were still wholly or largely owned and operated by agents of central or local government. In the case of roads construction and maintenance, finance also came from central or local government, and central or local government made substantial financial contributions to subsidize users of public transport. The Conservative administrations sought to disengage government from the transport sector: to privatize, to deregulate and to put residual administrative control in the hands of new, single-purpose bodies such as the Highways Agency and the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising. There has been a parallel policy of shifting responsibility for funding from the public to the private sector. Chapter 3 discussed the new administrative arrangements. This chapter outlines the responsibilities for funding that remain with central and local governments, and the new sources of privatesector finance.

Towards a Transport Policy for the Twenty-First Century

This book has explored the financial and economic constraints within which transport policy is made (Part IV), as well as the planning systems at local and national level which allow both environmental and economic considerations to be assessed and given proper weight in the taking of decisions about particular schemes (Part III). The networks of policy-makers and those who seek to influence them at local, national and supranational levels of government have been identified (Part II). These complex structures and institutional arrangements reflect the complexity of the pressures and influences which have to be reconciled in the formulation of transport policy. Having laid out the pitch, explained the rules of the game, and provided notes on the players, it is now time to return to a review of the key issues and policy options which need to be addressed, as transport policy, shaped by these actors and limited by these constraints, moves into a third millennium in which more people and more goods will want to travel further and faster than ever before.

The Evolution of Transport Policy

The crowds which gathered in October 1829 to watch the Rainhill trials, which resulted in the choice of Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ for the Liverpool and Manchester railway when it opened a year later, would have been proud of the tremendous advances in transport which had already been made within their lifetime. As children some might have watched the construction of the Bridgewater Canal in the 1760s, in the same transport corridor between Manchester and Liverpool, signalling the start of the great era of canal building which by the end of the century had linked the Mersey first with the Trent and then with Thames and Severn in a network which laid down the essential transport infrastructure for Britain’s industrial revolution. Over the past decade or so the appalling state of the roads had been much improved by John Loudon Macadam’s better surfaces and Thomas Telford’s engineering on the London-Holyhead road, which together had reduced coach journey times between London and Manchester from four-and-a-half days with the first ‘Flying Coaches’ in 1754 to a mere eighteen hours and eighteen minutes by the ‘Manchester Telegraph’ in 1830 (Savage, 1966: 30). The canals and turnpikes were transporting goods and passengers more speedily and efficiently than before, but their monopoly position enabled them to charge excessive prices.

Making Transport Policy in Britain

One of the strengths of the British system of governance is the collective responsibility of ministers for all aspects of the government’s policy; but this collective strength carries with it the consequence that the minister responsible for transport is by no means a free agent. Other ministers, especially the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chief Secretary (Treasury) and the ministers responsible for planning and local government, for environmental protection and for industrial competitiveness all have a major impact on the shaping of transport policies. Implementation is in the hands of a very wide range of agents in both the public and the private sector, and although the Department of Transport controls some of them directly, its ability to influence others is more limited, particularly after 18 years of Conservative governments committed to ‘rolling back the frontiers of the State’. Between 1979 and 1997 governments turned increasingly to the market to provide competitive transport services subject to a minimum of regulation in the public interest, rejecting coordination by politicians and bureaucrats in departments, councils and corporations. The Labour government elected in May 1997 inherited a structure of government that allows the transport industries more freedom from government control than at any time since at least 1930 and probably since before the First World War.

Interest Groups and Transport Policy

Central and local governments, Parliament and European Union institutions are formal actors in the British policy-making process, given express authority to make decisions. Trying to influence these structures of elected representative democracy are the informal actors called interest groups, pressure groups or lobbying groups. They are often divided into two categories: ‘sectional’ groups — that is, groups defending or expressing the ‘self-interest’ of their section of society, such as the Freight Transport Association (FTA), rail workers’ unions, and the Cement and Concrete Association; and ‘promotional’ or ‘cause’ groups, which promote changes in attitudes or in policies that affect the general public, such as Transport 2000, which campaigns for increased public transport provision, and Friends of the Earth, or the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. However, to make rigid distinctions in interest-group politics is to miss much of the action. First, many ‘self-interested’ groups would argue they also promote the wider public interest, not only when they take up outside causes (as the RAC did over coach seat-belts), but even in promoting their own interests, if they contribute to national economic growth. to national economic growth. Second, ‘cause’ groups may be supported primarily by sections of society whose interests they promote.

National Planning for Transport and the Environment

At national level it is not just individual planning decisions which may be controversial but planning itself. The Labour manifesto for the 1997 general election stated unequivocally that ‘a sustainable environment requires above all an effective and integrated transport policy at national, regional and local level’. The Conservative governments of 1979 to 1997 would not have agreed with that judgment. Their objections were expressed most characteristically by Cecil Parkinson, Transport Minister, 1989–90. He thought an integrated transport policy was ‘socialist’ and a ‘way of keeping well-paid bureaucrats occupied’ (Truelove, 1992: 8). But this attitude was echoed more moderately by people from across the political spectrum interviewed for this book, who mostly wanted a Greater London authority that could coordinate transport provision, but ‘did not want GLC-type planning’. They were rejecting the prescriptive planning of the GLC, especially under Labour majorities, bearing down on London boroughs and private enterprises alike, which imposed patterns of travel that planners believed would be effective at regional level, but which did not find favour at local level.