The immediate agenda - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 384

In substance the programme now consists more of widening existing roads - particularly
motorways - and increasing the capacity of junctions which act as bottlenecks. Although
the wisdom of this policy can be challenged, it invokes issues of principle and of technical
argument rather than the more immediately controversial matter of the local impact
of wholly new roads. In addition the Government has been careful to amend or reject
proposals for new roads which would have significantly adverse environmental effects.
This has avoided creating causes célèbres which might be utilised by campaigners to raise
public opposition against 'road-building' more generally.
The low profile is also attributable to the way the programme has been progressed.
Since the landmark review conducted at the time of the New Deal White Paper
there has been no strategic document which has presented the current version of the
programme, its rationale and implications, which might have drawn attention to the
policy issues at stake. Instead there has been a series of incremental changes including
the Government's acceptance of some of the recommendations from the Multi-Modal
studies in 2002 and 2003 and subsequent decisions on individual schemes.
In presentational terms it has also been convenient to allow statements made at the
time of the 1998 Review to remain 'on the table':
Ministers still claim publicly that roads are built only as a last resort but privately
concede that in many areas there is no other option for coping with rapidly rising
traffic.
( The Times 22 April 2006, reported in LTT 442)
The Government has also chosen to emphasise its aspirations for better management
of the strategic road network at the expense of giving due acknowledgement to the
volume of road-building it is still supporting. For example in the chapter on roads
in the 2004 White Paper barely a page was given to 'investing in the road network'
compared with a dozen on various aspects of management, including the option of
charging.
More recently the management of the network and its traffic has come to assume
greater significance but for rather different reasons than those originally envisaged. In
2006 following an investigation by the National Audit Office into the escalating cost
of road schemes an independent review was commissioned of the Highways Agency's
handling of its road programme (Nichols 2007). This recommended that its Targeted
Programme of Improvements (TPI) should be replaced by a three-stage process with
funding committed incrementally until estimates are judged to be reasonably robust
(Box 23.1). A restructuring of the Agency's programme on this basis is reported in
LTT 466.
Evidence of cost increases continued to provide embarrassing headlines. The cost
of widening sections of the M1 for example was reported to have increased by 38%
to £5.1bn. Several Regional Assemblies publicised the fact that, without additional
funding from the Agency, they would not be able to continue to prioritise its schemes
included in their RFA which had undergone major cost increases. Meanwhile the
Public Accounts Committee recommended that large trunk road schemes of regional
importance which would otherwise absorb the majority of the regional budget should
be taken out of the RFA process and placed within the national programme (LTT 481)
- alleviating one problem but aggravating another.
Fortuitously Ministers were presented with a way out of this intractable financial
situation by the timely receipt of a report on a pilot study of Active Traffic Management