A new deal for transport? - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 127

Box 8.1 Principal outputs expected to be delivered by the Ten Year Plan (to 2010)
• 360 miles of motorway widening
• all 40 schemes in the Highways Agency's Targeted Programme of Improvements,
30 trunk road bypasses and 80 major schemes tackling bottlenecks at other
junctions
• 200 major local road improvements including 70 bypasses
• a £30bn programme to eliminate the backlog in local road and bridge maintenance
• completion of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and the West Coast Main Line renewal,
plus upgrades of the East Coast and Great Western main lines
• completion of the Thameslink 2000 and East London line extension projects plus
a new east-west rail link in London such as CrossRail
• elimination of the backlog of maintenance and renewal work on the London
Underground through a Public-Private Partnership
• 25 new light rail schemes and 100 park-and-ride schemes
• introduction of road user charging in eight of the largest English towns and cities
outside London and a further twelve workplace parking schemes.
of 'future choices'. Lord Macdonald was also happy to leave the prospect of national
road user charging in the long grass - 'a discussion for the second half of the decade'.
The Plan came in for serious criticism on the basis of what were still ostensibly the
principles of the Government's strategy. A report by the House of Commons Select
Committee was particularly scathing (House of Commons 2002). Whilst acknowledging
that the Plan represented a welcome move away from the uncertainty of short-term
funding regimes it queried the adequacy of a ten-year period for establishing a 'long-
term vision':
It is essential that the projects put in place form part of a long-term sustainable
solution and not just a medium-term fix that moves us further towards car
dependence.
(ibid. para 11)
The Committee called for the examination of a range of policy options after 2010
based on rigorous advice from experts in the field. It criticised the Plan's concentration
on the issue of congestion and the fact that the Government was willing to see a
widening of the gap between the costs of public and private transport:
It cannot have been the Department's objective to produce a plan that benefits
the better off and those who travel the most. However the Plan acknowledges
that it does just that. It is in complete contradiction to the Department's desires
to reduce the need to travel and the Government's aims to promote equity and
social inclusion.
(ibid. para 37)
In conception the Ten Year Plan was seriously flawed and a disingenuous attempt to
wrap a rather primitive, albeit grandiose, prospectus within the cloak of the New Deal.
Unfortunately, as it transpired, the reality was even worse.