Magazine Issue 11: Road-building Revisited

Magazine Issue 11 Summer 2000

Road-building Revisited

Sensing new Government sympathy, motoring and construction groups have started to dust down old road plans. Stephen Joseph outlines concerns over this spring clean.

Large shopping lists are being drawn up for the Government to put into a ten-year plan for transport, due this summer. Construction companies are beginning to take on new staff to bid for a new ‘stealth roads programme’, as the construction magazine New Civil Engineer described it.

But surely anti-roads protests stopped all this? For a time, maybe. The Tories found themselves attacked by alliances of direct action protesters with middle England residents, and the 1989 Roads for Prosperity programme of 500 trunk road schemes was chopped down until only 120 schemes remained by the 1997 election. Labour came to power committed to a full review of the programme, and decided to build just 37 schemes. Some of these are on a grand scale, like the A120 in Essex - linked to a massive expansion of Stansted Airport and part of an old ‘outer M25’ plan – but most are smaller scale local schemes. Most of the rest were pushed into the long grass of ‘multi-modal studies’ and it is these that will be used to resurrect the roads programme.

The studies are a good idea in theory – looking at all solutions to traffic problems including rail, bus, cycle and walking and perhaps even cutting traffic (demand-management) or less car-based out of town developments. Environmental groups are represented on the steering groups for all the studies and have found that in practice they vary: some are taking alternatives seriously, while some are seen as another hoop to go through before the original road schemes are approved. In the worst case, the A66 roads study across the north Pennines, the steering group consists of one environmental representative plus councillors and business interests who are also members of the local pro-roads campaign. Attempts to include options such as lower speeds and railfreight in the study brief have met with stiff resistance.

All this would matter less if the Government was still committed to cutting road building and traffic. But it isn’t. Internal government support for cuts has been sidelined after a backlash of motoring groups, road hauliers, the Tories and newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun. This has been helped along by resistance from hauliers and rural motorists to increased taxes, opposition to initiatives like the M4 bus lane and scare stories about £5000 to drive into cities. The perception in the Government now is that being seen to be anti-car is a vote loser and that alternatives to cars and lorries won’t work.

So we have had a series of retreats. A strategy to promote walking for short journeys disappeared and turned into an ‘advice note’. A road safety strategy rejected any idea of cutting the national speed limits on local roads from 30 to 20 miles per hour. Friends of the Earth’s campaign for national targets to cut traffic was rejected, on the grounds that traffic levels are not a problem, that congestion and pollution are what matter. Never mind that communities already feel they have too much traffic or that the Commission for Integrated Transport (which the Government claimed supported its stance) recommended that the Government could and should set targets to cut traffic by 2010 in towns and cities and to move towards cutting it everywhere thereafter.

This was followed by the recent Budget, which included no increases in fuel taxes, cut taxes on the biggest and most damaging lorries and gave the go-ahead for increasing the maximum weight of heavy lorries to 44 tonnes, with no compensating commitments on railfreight. The Freight Transport Association had lobbied hard for these measures.

Behind the new pro-business line is Lord MacDonald, the Minister who has taken over responsibility for transport. Gus MacDonald (whose club membership according to Who’s Who includes the RAC) is a media magnate and is rumoured to be a strong believer in road building with little time for environmental issues. He has made strongly pro-road and pro-haulier speeches to the Freight Transport Association.

So the road lobby is massing once more. Business interests are privately suggesting that we don’t need more studies – let’s just get on and build, perhaps with added privatisation or commercialisation of the Highways Agency to get private funding in.

The irony is that the alternatives have not even been tried. The Government has failed to push any quick wins such as a national discount railcard, a national safe routes to school initiative, or integrated local bus and rail services, leaving it instead to local councils and private operators. Even when these have done good things, the Government hasn’t endorsed them or publicised them, so the public has been presented with sticks such as road pricing, magnified by scare stories, without any carrots.

So having not tried too hard to give people alternatives to the car, the Government seems to have decided to return to roads. On present form, the question is not when, but whether, and what size. A 14-lane M6? 20 lanes? Do I hear 25? The bidding has begun.