The curious death – and life? – of British transport policy

Abstract

This article analyses the transport policy record of the 2010-2015 ConservativeLiberal Democrat Coalition and 2015-16 Conservative majority UK governments. We argue that the style of policy making under these administrations departed significantly from that of previous decades, which had been characterised by the ascendancy of specific technical disciplines and decision making norms about how transport planning should be carried out. Our key contention is that despite abandoning the idea of a single, overall narrative for transport policy, these governments (perhaps unwittingly) gave new life to broader debates about what transport investment is actually for and how investment decisions should be made. We interpret this as a shift away from the longstanding idea of a 'deliberate' strategy of intervention to a more 'emergent' approach, which raises important new questions about the future of transport policy both in terms of the objectives it seeks to realise and the relative influence of professional/technical and political actors in the policy process. 2 IntroductionFor more than 50 years, UK governments of all political persuasions have published a succession of documents heralding a brave new age of transport policy. Highlights include Buchanan's Traffic in Towns in the 1960s (Ministry of Transport, 1963), which correctly predicted how the insatiable demands for more road space arising from mass car ownership would impact upon historic towns and cities; Roads for Prosperity's 'biggest road building programme since the Romans' in the heady days of the 1980s economic boom (Department of Transport, 1989); and the immodestly titled A New Deal for Transport, which promised a transformation that would "give transport the highest possible priority" (Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), 1998) such that its accompanying £180bn Ten Year Plan would "deliver radical improvements for passengers, motorists, business -and all of us as citizens concerned about congestion, safety and a better environment" (DETR, 2000).The contradiction in all of this is that despite a plethora of highly ambitious policy statements, Britain's transport system remains underdeveloped compared with those of other major European economies because Ministers of whichever party have all-too-often been unable to turn policy rhetoric into action (Table 1). The collapse of the Blair government's New Deal for Transport demonstrates this especially well. Despite deliberately referencing Roosevelt's massive public works programmes of the 1930s, the New Deal and its ambitious delivery programme actually failed to deliver very much at all on the ground. Instead of light rail in 25 cities across the country, only one new system 3 and the extension of one other were actually achieved; congestion charging failed to move beyond London despite ambitions to have systems operating in eight cities by the end of the Ten Year Plan period; the domestic rail network had to be rescued from a maintenance crisis rather than expanded and ...

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