The immediate agenda - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 383

23 The immediate agenda
23.1 Introduction
Since 2004 policy-makers have been occupied with delivering updated versions of
the modally specific programmes conceived in the Ten Year Plan and with reforming
failed institutional arrangements for the national railways and for transport in major
urban areas legislated for in the Transport Act 2000. The main additional - and highly
troublesome - item has been the proposal for national road user charging first floated
in 2003 and a core feature of the 2004 White Paper.
In this chapter we consider the recent policy initiatives taken in relation to each
of the main modes, beginning with the National Roads Programme (23.2), national
road user charging (23.3) and the Transport Innovation Fund which promotes local
charging schemes (23.4). We then report the structural reform of rail planning
introduced by the 2005 Railways Act and the strategy for rail to 2014 announced
in the 2007 White Paper (23.5). Proposals for altering the regulation of bus services
contained in a 2006 White Paper are described in section 23.6 and then we discuss
the additional measures concerning governance in city regions included in the Local
Transport Act 2008 (23.7).
An additional dimension to local transport planning in many areas has been the
infrastructure requirements arising from the planned large increases in new housing.
We report on these in section 23.8 and on utilising the associated new funding streams,
including the option of a Community Infrastructure Levy provided for in the Planning
Bill published in 2007.
We conclude with the current DfT 'vision' and performance indicators for the
Department set by the Treasury (23.9).
23.2 The National Roads Programme
Compared with the controversy generated by the national roads programme in the
mid-1990s it has received remarkably little public attention in the years since 2004.
However this is not because it has ceased to exist! As a matter of deliberate policy
set in the Ten Year Plan the programme now occupies a smaller proportion of total
transport expenditure than hitherto (see Figure 12.2 previously). However this should
not obscure the fact that investment in these was planned to return to the real terms
levels of the mid-1990s and that actual cash spending increased from £1.2bn to £1.9bn
in the three years to 2007/08.
The relatively low profile of the programme can be attributed to two main factors
- its substance and its presentation.