The 1990s paradigm shift - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 109

One of the great difficulties that has been experienced in the past….has been
the political resistance from individuals or interest groups who feel their freedom
to pursue their private and company interests is under threat from planners or
bureaucrats motivated by dogma rather than legitimate social objectives. Perhaps
there has been an element of truth in this on occasion. But now the situation is
different; it is traffic growth, and inappropriate responses to it, which constitutes
the threat to economic efficiency and a decent quality of living. The objective of
the 'New Realism' is to make life better, not worse.
(ibid. p. 6)
The impact of the New Realism report cannot be attributed to its individual
recommendations which were neither especially novel nor sophisticated, or to the
battery of research papers which accompanied them. Rather the appeal of the report
lay in presenting a practicable package as an alternative 'brand' to rather tired
conventional wisdom at a particularly fortuitous time. The package was cleverly
pitched between the positions of key stakeholders and skilfully articulated by the head
of TSU, Phil Goodwin. Its message was already well accepted within the academic
community and amongst leading practitioners, increasingly acknowledged by the
professional rank and file, but just ahead of the Government and many interest groups
working within the industry. The New Realism was partly recognition of what had
already come to exist (though not perhaps so succinctly conceptualised) but partly also
of what had yet to be grasped.
7.4 'Sustainable development'
As in the 1970s, the need to make spending cuts in the inter-urban roads programme
happened to coincide with an upsurge in concern for the environment, and Ministers
were not averse to using arguments from the latter to 'massage' the former. This
time however the environmental concern had acquired greater standing through the
concept of 'sustainable development'.
The concept can be traced back to the global environmental concerns registered at
the 1972 United Nations Environment Conference in Stockholm and to subsequent
work examining anticipatory and preventative policies. This work acquired added
impetus in the 1980s following evidence of the effects of acid rain and the depletion
of the ozone layer. The term 'sustainable development' itself came into popular use
after the 1987 Brundtland Report of the World Commission for Environment and
Development in which it was defined as 'development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs'.
Environmental issues acquired unusually high visibility in domestic British politics in
1989 when the Green Party achieved an unprecedentedly high share of the vote (15%)
in the European elections. Mrs Thatcher attached great importance to the subject
and to developing an appropriate response to the issue of global warming in particular
(Maddison and Pearce 1995) . In 1990 she personally led the launch of a White Paper
which was the first-ever review of environmental policies across all departments of
government (DOE et al. 1990). Whilst there was still disagreement internationally
on the need for action the Paper asserted that global warming represented one of
the biggest environmental challenges facing the world and committed the British
government to reversing the trend of growing carbon emissions. 'In the long term' the