A new deal for transport? - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 126

Minister) Lord 'Gus' Macdonald - a high-profile Scottish businessman who had a
reputation for competence and a 'no-nonsense' approach (LTT 306) . Macdonald was
charged with overseeing the preparation of a ten-year plan for transport in the context
of the Government's Comprehensive Spending Review then under way.
First sight of the technical work underpinning the plan appeared in a document
which the Government was required to publish in response to the Road Traffic
Reduction (National Targets) Act 1998. The report (DETR 2000d) applied to
England only, responsibility in Scotland and Wales having passed to the new devolved
administrations. The Government's thinking was conditioned by projections which
showed that, if the White Paper measures were applied very intensively, national
traffic growth would almost have ceased by 2010, whilst traffic levels in the major cities
would have fallen below 1996 levels. However it did not accept the case for a national
target, although national traffic levels would continue to be reported as a 'useful broad
indicator' as part of the monitoring of sustainable development.
Our policies focus on improving outcomes that affect people's quality of life in the
real world. We already have targets for many of these: climate change, air quality,
health and road safety. The issue is therefore whether a national road traffic
reduction target would be a useful addition to the current range of targets. Our
conclusion is that it would not and that we should concentrate on developing
better indicators, and then considering targets for those outcomes for which we
do not currently have targets.
(ibid. para 18)
The Ten Year Plan itself was published in July 2000 (DETR 2000f). The notion
of a national transport plan embodying particular levels of public expenditure over a
period as long as ten years was unprecedented, although strictly there was no formal
commitment beyond the three years covered by the Spending Review. In contrast with
the financial stringency of New Labour's first term it proposed expenditure of £180bn
over the ten-year period - a claimed increase of 75% in real terms. In fact some £56bn
of the total was expected to consist of private investment. Within the overall total
there were major shifts in spending allocations to rail and local transport which had
continuing policy significance (12.5).
In his foreword to the Plan Prescott described it as a 'ten-year route map to take us
towards the goals we set for ourselves in the Manifesto and the Integrated Transport
White Paper'. This was a fudge since in reality the strategy was completely different.
There was no reference to the 'consensus for radical change', nor any emphasis on
changing travel behaviour. The claim made just two years previously that there was no
longer any need for a large-scale road building programme was conveniently overlooked.
Instead the White Paper resorted to the traditional idea that transport conditions are
a function of the quality of the infrastructure and that contemporary problems were
a product of decades of under-investment. In the interests of the country's economic
prosperity it was deemed 'vital' to tackle this legacy and to transform the nation's
transport networks. The expected outputs from the Plan are shown in Box 8.1.
Amidst the triumphalist atmosphere surrounding the launch of the Plan it would
have been jarring to suggest that all the planned investment would still not cope with
the anticipated increase in car use. But tucked away in the back of Transport 2010 was
a chapter which acknowledged the 'difficult challenge' which growing car use would
continue to pose. However this was massaged away by discussing it under the heading