peak times and you can do that if you want, or you might decide not to do
it, but that is one way of doing it’.
Most importantly the episode laid bare the extent to which the government as a whole had failed to address some of the fundamental issues
raised by road pricing, notably what would happen to the revenues
raised.60 On 19 February the junior minister Stephen Ladyman said on a
radio broadcast,61 ‘The second thing people are concerned about is that
it’s going to be an additional charge . . . and what we are saying [is] it’s
going to be a charge instead of the additional road taxes . . . people . . . in
most parts of Wales will actually be better off’. In other words the government had already decided that road pricing would be tax revenue neutral.
This had been the line taken by senior Labour politicians on previous
occasions. Yet in his email Blair says ‘funds raised from these local
schemes [potential pilot schemes being worked up in places such as
Birmingham and Manchester] will be used to improve transport in those
areas.’ And in the podcast he says:
You could decide you were going to get rid of all the other taxes and just
have that and you could decide that it is going to be revenue neutral. Now
all these are policy decisions that you take in the future. The only issue at
the moment is do you want to investigate this technology as a way of
dealing with the problem both of congestion and of how you raise money
for transport, do you want to do it or not? . . . part of what you need to do
is to raise money to invest in a better public transport system, because the
best way of reducing congestion is if you have a better transport system . . .
I could name you about five different city schemes for metro links and so
on, and light rail systems, and transit systems and so on, but you have got
to raise money for all of these.
60 The issues are discussed in Stephen Glaister and Dan Graham, National Road Pricing: Is it
Fair and Practical? (London: Social Market Foundation, 2006). A particularly important
issue is the difference in incidence on different parts of the population implied by different
policies on the use of road pricing revenue.
61 BBC Eye on Wales.
It was plain that through the mechanism of the e-petition the government had managed to procure a strong public reaction against a policy
that the public could not possibly have understood, not least because the
government itself had not begun to resolve fundamental questions: and it
certainly had not explained what is a very complex proposition.
The magnitude of the government’s failure to explain its position was
revealed in a YouGov survey for the Daily Telegraph between 19 and 21
February which estimated that ‘84 percent reckon either that the present
Government’s sole motive in advocating road pricing is the desire to raise
revenue (48 per cent) or that it is one of the Government’s motives, along
with the desire to reduce congestion and pollution (36 per cent).’
Commenting on the whole episode Anthony King remarked that ‘If road
pricing turns out not to be the present Government’s poll tax, it will only
be because neither this administration nor any other administration is
likely to go anywhere near it.’62
This poor management by No. 10 of what could have been a truly
radical development of transport policy has undoubtedly weakened the
chances of its implementation in the foreseeable future. As Blair himself
observes in his podcast: ‘Well as I say this is years in advance, but having
gone through the fuel protest, I think it is highly unlikely that you will
find politicians in the future putting something forward if people just are
completely rebelling against it.’
Blair’s personal interventions
If Blair showed a general disinterest in high-level transport policy he
showed himself to be perfectly willing to intervene when he was personally affected. In the autumn of 2002 Transport for London was engaged in
a quantity of road works in preparation for the introduction of congestion charging. One Friday afternoon some contractors at Vauxhall left
work, leaving behind unattended but defective temporary traffic lights.
The Prime Minister’s wife was seriously delayed in the ensuing traffic
jam. Action was immediate. Blair required junior Transport Minister
John Spellar to investigate, to make weekly reports and to make recommendations. After some debate about whether it would be better to
remove traffic management powers and give them to a ‘traffic Tsar’
(which would have been a bizarre contradiction to the creation of the
devolved GLA) it was sensibly decided that highway authorities such as
62 Daily Telegraph, 26 February 2007.
the TfL required stronger powers. A Bill was announced in the November
2003 Queen’s Speech and the Traffic Management Act had royal assent by
July 2004. Blair could certainly make things happen in the transport
policy world when he put his mind to it.
Another less benign example emerged during evidence given at the Old
Bailey concerning corporate manslaughter and health and safety charges
arising from the Hatfield railway accident. The Times reported evidence
given in court that the Prime Minister had applied ‘naked’ pressure to
Railtrack executives to lift the speed restrictions plaguing the network.63 He
had offered to ‘syndicate’ or share the risks. This is an extraordinary suggestion. It is that the Prime Minister was seeking to influence the professional
judgement both of those accountable to their shareholders for running a
private company (hence the court case) and of the independent rail safety
regulators. It is also unclear what ‘syndicating’ the risks might mean in
practice: had the Prime Minister’s requests contributed to a subsequent
fatal accident it is hard to see that there is a mechanism in law whereby the
Prime Minister could have somehow taken over culpability from those
accountable for running a safe railway. If the government or parliament
were discontented with the way Hatfield had been handled, then the appropriate response would have been to legislate with due process.
Crossrail is another becalmed major project that Blair took a personal
interest in. This is a proposal for a large new underground railway joining
Heathrow and points west of London with Stratford and Canary Wharf in
the east via Paddington and Liverpool Street. First approved by the
Thatcher administration in 1989 as a solution to crowding in central
London, and latterly forming a centrepiece of Ken Livingstone’s solution
for dealing with growing demand, Transport ,64 this project has had
several hundred million pounds spent on planning and design work but
no government has been willing to find the funds to build it. Quite early in
Blair’s first term his advisors in the No. 10 Policy Unit showed an interest
in the scheme. Blair appeared to be convinced of the case. His personal
letter to his new Secretary of State for Transport in May 2006 includes ‘we
need to
ensure that we have identified a clear way forward on Crossrail,
consistent with sensible handling of the Bill currently before Parliament.’65
But he could not secure from the Treasury the firm commitment necessary
towards the £16 billion estimated cost of the scheme:66
63 The Times, 12 March 2005.
64 Transport for London, Transport 2025 (London: TfL, November 2005).
65 www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page9455.asp.
66 Christopher Adams, Financial Times, 8 March 2007.
In a private meeting with a delegation of business and trade union leaders
led by Ken Livingstone, London’s Mayor, Mr Blair sought to dispel fears that
the government had gone cool on the £10 bn [in 2002 prices, more recently
estimated at about £16 billion] railway, saying that it was ‘absolutely committed . . . The prime minister . . . believes a decision in principle can be
made on Crossrail ahead of this year’s comprehensive spending review.
Blair’s growing interest in transport
In transport policy documents prior to 2001, if there was a foreword it
would be by the Secretary of State for Transport and Deputy Prime
Minister, John Prescott. After 2001 it seems that Blair had realised a need
to take a closer personal interest. That Blair wrote a warm foreword to
Motoring Towards , an independent report by the RAC Foundation
was remarkable. The 2004 Transport White Paper also has a foreword by
the Prime Minister which is only 25% shorter than the Secretary of State
for Transport’s own preface. It shows the extent to which Blair had sought
to impose his own view. The first substantive paragraph includes: ‘Over
100 road schemes have been completed. The M25 is being widened . . .
we want to see Crossrail in London, road widening and bypasses to tackle
the worst areas of congestion.’ It would have been unthinkable to start a
major transport policy statement in this way during Blair’s first term.
So by the beginning of his second term Blair had realised that transport was a problem and that he had lost faith in the ability of his
Secretaries of State or the Chancellor to solve them. He decided to
become more directly involved, and to do that he strengthened the
resources available to him directly. Lord Birt had silently attended a
Cabinet Office seminar in November 2001 where academics and other
experts had been invited to express their views about the long-term issues
in transport, without having been told that this was essentially an initial
briefing for Birt. The No. 10 website records a press briefing by the Prime
Minister’s official spokesman (PMOS):
Asked to clarify exactly what it was about Lord Birt which had so impressed
the Prime Minister that he believed he could solve the country’s transport
problems, the PMOS said it was important to make a distinction between
what the Forward Strategy Unit (FSU) – of which Lord Birt was a
member – was and was not doing . . . we had set up a small unit within
Government composed of people drawn from different backgrounds who
could look at some of the longer term issues facing our public services ten
or twenty years down the line.
Asked the difference between the FSU and the Policy Unit, the PMOS
said that the FSU’s role was to look at issues ten or twenty years hence.
The new Policy Directorate’s role was to look at the short and medium
terms.67
The Leader of the Opposition was quick to articulate a general
concern, particularly within the civil service, that transport policy development was becoming confused and unaccountable.68 The Commons
Select Committee on Transport complained about the way the normal
systems of scrutiny were being evaded by Birt’s position.69 Lord Birt had
not accepted an invitation to provide oral evidence to their inquiry into
the Ten-Year Plan. Noting that a couple of members of Lord Birt’s team
were being paid for by the transport department they expressed the view
that it is important that those engaged in policy should be accountable to
parliament through the select committee system.
Neither papers written for Birt, nor reports written by Birt for the
Prime Minister, have been made public. But it became known that one
proposal emanating from Downing Street was for a new network of tolled
motorways. This idea was scotched by Alistair Darling on taking office as
Transport Secretary.70
Press appraisals of Birt’s role71 reported a lack of clarity over how, or if,
Birt’s access translated into real power. They also reported irritation in
the civil service that Blair had quietly created what was effectively a Prime
Minister’s department in which Birt, unelected and unaccountable
through civil service codes, was a key part. They noted that the number of
consultants hired by the government had exploded, just as it did at the
BBC in the Birtian days. It is reported that senior civil servants moaned
about the increase in management consultancy ‘Birtspeak’ in communications from what is referred to disparagingly as ‘the Centre’.
As if in confirmation of the suggestion that the Chancellor felt threatened on transport policy by the ‘blue skies thinking’ seeping from No. 10,
in his March 2005 Budget Gordon Brown announced yet another
transport policy initiative.72 Sir Rod Eddington was to advise ministers
on the impact of transport decisions on Britain’s productivity, stability
and growth beyond 2015. Although technically a joint exercise between
Treasury and Transport, the terms of reference read like ‘Treasury-speak’.
67 8 January 2002.
68 House of Commons, 23 January 2002.
69 House of Commons Transport Committee, press notice, 31 January 2002.
70 Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2002.
71 David Hencke, The Guardian, 27 January 2005, and Rachel Sylvester, Daily Telegraph, 10
January 2005.
72 The Guardian, 17 March 2005.
It is likely that the exercise was partly motivated by the Treasury in an
attempt to influence the Department for Transport to change the way it
spends its budgets in favour of what the Treasury would see as better
value for public money.
Sir Rod Eddington’s review73 reasonably said that the way to obtain
the best value from a limited public budget is to select the schemes with
the greatest benefits in relation to their costs. He reviewed a portfolio of
schemes, but careful reading of his report does not reveal strong support
for increasing expenditure on railways. And as one press report noticed,
‘three-quarters of the 186 projects . . . Sir Rod Eddington considered
which showed the benefits outweighed the costs involved were road
schemes. Just 14 were rail improvements, the rest involved trams, buses,
walking and cycling proposals.74
Conclusion
In his introduction to The Code of Practice on Consultation,75 Tony Blair
wrote ‘effective consultation is a key part of the policy-making process’.
The episodes related in this chapter
illustrate that if there is not effective
consultation then the process is unlikely to make successful policy.
They support Seldon’s view76 that ‘Tony Blair has never been a man who
has liked or felt a need to consult widely’. Each of the episodes exhibits
some or all of the following: lack of a clear overall policy direction; parallel development of closely related policies in several parts of Whitehall,
including a nebulous constellation of bodies in and around No. 10
Downing Street; a willingness to ignore or deny evidence; a reliance on
commercial management consultancy and individual advisers rather
than accountable ministers and their civil servants; a failure carefully to
develop policy and then legislation over a reasonable period of time; an
unwillingness to publish or consult on a substantive written account of
draft legislation giving the reasoning in support of it; and a reluctance to
be exposed to scrutiny.
Had scrutiny and critique been heeded, then some of the mistakes
might have been avoided. The 1998 Transport White Paper proposed
more consultation rather than specific legislation (except for the creation
of the SRA, which took two and a half years to enact), but the generic
73 Sir Rod Eddington, The Eddington Transport Study (London, TSO, 2006).
74 Juliet Jowit, The Observer, 17 December 2006. The evidence has subsequently been published at www.dft.gov.uk/about/strategy/eddingtonstudy/pubeddingbase.
75 Cabinet Office, 2003.
76 Seldon, Blair, conclusion to 2nd edn, pp. 695–7.
policies it proposed did not square with the facts of the situation or the
reality of electoral sentiment. There soon had to be U-turns on road
building, fuel duties and later on road pricing which destroyed such
coherence as there was.
The Ten-Year Plan was a good concept and it did have high-quality
public documentation. However, the necessary revisions in the light of
unexpected events never happened, and a good idea died for lack of attention when Byers, the Treasury and the Prime Minister all lost interest.
The development of the PPP for the London Underground, the
destruction of Railtrack, its replacement by a new form of company, and
the process adopted for the next review of the railways policy were all
matters of national significance, involving considerable commitments of
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