Local transport plans - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 326

20 Local transport plans
20.1 Introduction
Local Transport Plans (LTPs) prepared by county or unitary councils in England outside
London have their origins in TPP documents (Transport Policies and Programmes)
which local highway authorities submitted annually to central government (5.6).
The administrative burden represented by the annual cycle of TPPs was intended
to be lessened with the shift to the five-yearly cycle of LTPs. In practice this proved
questionable as an onerous system of annual progress reporting was maintained. This
diversion of professional resources otherwise available for the delivery of services
and infrastructure into fulfilling the administrative requirements of the system has
been identified as one of its unintended consequences. Against this has to be set
the substantial advances made in the scale and quality of local authorities' transport
planning activity, which was the prime reason for the Labour Government introducing
LTPs as part of its 'New Deal'. Overall the system continues to enjoy considerable
professional support:
... the strengths of the process are seen as outweighing the weaknesses and many
of the latter relate to administration, funding and assessment of plan preparation
and delivery, rather than fundamental principles of the process itself.
(Atkins Transport Planning 2007a Executive Summary p. xiv)
The above comments derive from an extremely thorough process of independent
monitoring of the workings of the new system to which the reader is referred.
In this chapter we note first the intended role of LTPs (20.2), the administrative
procedures for their preparation (20.3) and their funding context (20.4). We then
consider their overall form and content (20.5) before looking in more detail at three
key elements - the setting of objectives and priorities (20.6), performance indicators
and targets (20.7) and the treatment of major schemes (20.8). Finally we review the
equivalent processes followed in London, Wales and Scotland (20.9).
20.2 The role of Local Transport Plans
DfT and its predecessors have traditionally viewed 'planning' as a relatively narrow and
largely technical activity concerned with the way individual investment proposals are
generated and assessed for the purposes for allocating grants and approving borrowing.
Concerns for a more holistic, spatial approach (even confined to transport alone) have