Transport audit

The most likely cause of the rail crash at Potters bar last year was a set of badly -maintained points. The verdict of the Health and Safety Executive came as no great surprise.

It pointed up, again, what everyone who travels from A to B in the country already knows: the transport system is ramshackle, unreliable and inefficient. This government promised to fix it.

So, for the second of our four major audits of whether the government is delivering, Dennis Sewell examined whether or not there's anything which adds up to a coherent policy.

VOX POP:
Driving a car is a lot cheaper than getting a train. In the train, you have to sit with hundreds of people in trains that aren't that nice, to be honest.

VOX POP:
There was this idea that public transport would solve all our problems, and it just hasn't done, and it's gone from bad to worse.

VOX POP:
I see the key question here is this divide all the time in transport between what's right from a policy perspective, and what's right from a political perspective.

DENNIS SEWELL:
This Government has made solemn promises about the future of the nation's transport. Labour have pledged to limit congestion on our roads and to make our trains and buses reliable and punctual. To be fair, they've always said this will take some time. But what progress, if any, has the Government made towards reaching its ambitious targets? We're asking - is Labour delivering on transport?

When Labour came into Government in 1997, Britain's roads were the most choked in Europe. Fewer and fewer of us were running for the bus, and although the new private trains were beginning to attract more passengers, the rail infrastructure, kept short of investment for decades, was beginning to groan and creak. It was perhaps a mark of how seriously the incoming government took all this, that the job of sorting it out was given to John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, at the head of a new super ministry combining transport, environment and planning. Transport, Mr Prescott announced, was in crisis. What it needed was a strategy.

This is how we used to make our journeys back in 1997. Of total miles travelled: 5% were by bus, only 4% by train. That "other" includes lorries, taxis, the London Underground, air, biking, walking and so on. But the big one, 79%, by car. John Prescott and his advisers looked at this, consulted widely and came up with a ten-year plan.

PROFESSOR PHILIP GOODWIN,
Former Government Transport Adviser:
The idea was there would be a massive new rail investment. There would be growth of bus transport, reversing the long-term decline. There would be growth in walking and cycling. There would be also new road construction, and that the combined total of these would bring congestion down and reduce the environmental impact of transport. So this was a radical concept. The problem was that a lot of it simply wasn't clear how or whether you could put it into practice.

DENNIS SEWELL:
As in other public services, the Government has tried to put its plan into practice by setting targets. These include: limiting congestion on the trunk roads and in large urban areas, getting it back below year 2000 levels; a 50% increase in rail use, with improvements in punctuality and reliability; more bus and light rail use - 10% for buses, 12% for bus and light rail combined. There are other targets, too, for air quality, road accidents and the London Underground - the delivery deadline by 2010.

To pay for it all, more money, both from the taxpayer and from the private sector. Total public spending plus private investment in transport would rise from just under £10 billion in 1997, reaching £18.5 billion in 2004/2005 and over £19 billion in 2007. All of that represents over £180 billion over the ten years to delivery due in 2010.

Mr Prescott has moved on - his super ministry split up. Stephen Byers has come and gone too. But the Government is sticking with the programme.

Three years on, Newsnight has come to Manchester to see if the plan is working.

RADIO ANNOUNCER:
Here with the latest on the traffic news, here's Janine.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Implicit in the strategy is a need to persuade people like Alex Conti, a student at Manchester University, who commutes into the city from Cheshire, out of his car and on to public transport.

ALEX CONTI:
The train ticket at the moment to Manchester from Macclesfield, which is the nearest train station to my house, is £10 a day return. On top of that, I have to pay for the bus, which equates to £3 or £4, and I have to walk to the bus station. If you call that £15 a day, my car runs on £25 a week. That's on a busy week, when I drive around on the weekend as well. So, as you can see, the options are really limited. The car just ends up being a better option all round.

DENNIS SEWELL:
But each morning Alex has to sit in traffic, asking, "Why, oh, why is there so much congestion?"

ALEX CONTI:
To be honest, Manchester is a victim of its own success. I've been here for the last three or four years and I've seen it grow into a true European metropolis. I've looked at it host the Commonwealth Games and basically grow into a large city, the second city in England. The transport system hasn't matched the growth of the city itself.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Alex Conti is right. The more affluent we get, the more we want to travel. It's more or less a one-to-one relationship between demand for movement and economic growth. So what are the implications for traffic?

PROFESSOR STEPHEN GLAISTER,
Imperial College:
Looking forward, that's quite frightening. We all hope to get about 2.5% growth a year. So looking at 2010, we'll get the growth in traffic that goes with that. On top of that, the Government is expecting that cars will become more efficient, so the cost of buying your fuel will come down. They are assuming that fuel duty will stay roughly constant in real terms. That adds up to at least a third more traffic by 2010 than today.

RADIO ANNOUNCER:
We've still got the construction of the relief road ongoing...

DENNIS SEWELL:
Like their Conservative predecessors, the new Labour Government took the line that you can't solve the congestion problem just by building new roads. Besides, new roads were attracting protest - remember Swampy and Muppet Dave?

EDMUND KING,
RAC Foundation:
During the first few years of office, very little was achieved in transport because there were obvious signs that the road network needed improvement. The M25 was at crisis point, the M1, the M6, yet nothing really was done because there was this idea that public transport would solve all our problems. It just hasn't done and it's gone from bad to worse.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Between 1997 and 2000, the Government also hiked taxes on petrol. Partly this was, as Gordon Brown used to put it, to put the public finances on a sounder footing. But it was also to deter motoring, and it worked, more or less neutralising the traffic boosting effect of economic growth. But in autumn 2000, motorists made clear they were as mad as hell and weren't going to take it any more.

EDMUND KING:
They were the catalyst of the farmers and some of the truckers getting together. It was that continual increase, and at the same time the motorists didn't see any improvements in terms of potholes or bypasses or road improvements. So that was a unique situation.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Briefly, the Tories jumped ahead in the polls. The result was an easing off on tax and an apparent change in Labour's attitude to the driver. Nowadays, they even brag about the new strategic roads they are building. But could this painful lesson have made the Government too cautious, afraid to opt for really radical policies to deter traffic growth? Despite the new driver-friendly starts, in their hearts they'd really rather we caught the bus.

Rail commuter John Oates catches this free bus, sponsored by a group of local businesses. The target of a 10% increase in bus usage isn't ambitious. The whole national target is likely to be met by extra journeys in London alone. Yet in Manchester bus use has almost halved since deregulation in 1986.

MARK THREAPLETON,
Managing Director, Stagecoach Manchester:
Our main competitor is the car. If you look back over the past 30 years, you can map the increase in car usage with the decline in public transport.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Congestion costs private bus companies money. Why? Because they sign agreements with local authorities guaranteeing frequency of service. This route required 36 buses in 1997. But with all the extra hold-ups, today it needs 42. Stagecoach had to buy and crew 50 extra buses just to keep Manchester's service the same.

MARK THREAPLETON:
This is the difficulty. You travel around the roads in Manchester and you can see that there isn't the scope to widen roads and put in additional lanes just for buses. So whatever road space the bus has, then it has to be at the expense of the cars and the other road users. At the end of the day, if the bus is stuck in the same queue of traffic as the car, then you're not going to tempt people out of their cars.

DENNIS SEWELL:
It would be easy to mistake a group of transport managers for new Labour theorists. They're forever using words like stakeholder and partnership. That's because there's no army of public sector workers like nurses and teachers the Government can simply command to meet its targets. Instead, they put all the players - bus, train, tram and council - around a table, tell them to suppress their sexual interests and bond - all in pursuit of integrated transport. But competition law remains some years behind the third way.

CHRIS MULLIGAN,
Greater Mnachester Passenger Transport Exec:
I've got the Government or the Department of Transport telling me that I must collaborate with the bus operators and I've got the Office of Fair Trading saying, "Don't you dare collaborate with the bus operators, or rather the bus operators will not collaborate with each other." It was even suggested to me by an anonymous civil servant at a meeting that when we have these meetings we should all have our lawyers with us, which would make for a frank exchange of views, wouldn't it? I have these deals arranged with bus operators and they refuse to sign them because at the end of the day, under the new Competition Act, you cannot only be fined, you can end up in prison. Fond as I am of the private sector bus operators, I don't want to share a cell with them.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN GLAISTER:
At the time the Labour Government came to power in 1997, the railways were actually running rather well. If you look at the figures, you'll find patronage was shooting up. It had shot up since privatisation in 1993. It was growing at about 7% or 8% a year in 1997. It carried on growing in 1998 and 1999 and up to 2000. It was a success story.

DENNIS SEWELL:
But in the autumn of 2000, soon after the fuel crisis, came the Hatfield crash. No-one has called the railways a success story since.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN GLAISTER:
The Hatfield crash brought to a head a lot of public disquiet about the railways. It is true that as the railways were very successful, there were more and more trains, they were getting in each other's way and the quality of service being offered was falling, simply because we were trying to do too much with existing infrastructure.

DENNIS SEWELL:
That infrastructure was literally cracking. Speed was restricted, trains cancelled. But not all the delays that threatened to upset the Government's punctuality and reliability targets were down to infrastructure.

In Manchester, a group of passengers went to see the boss of First North Western and offered to help him improve the service. Keen train-spotter John Oates was one of them.

JOHN OATES:
We could be 40 minutes late, you missed your connection. Around here, there is an alternative. Sure, you can sit in a traffic jam on Princes Parkway, in south Manchester for 20 minutes, but at least it's warm, it's comfortable, you're playing the music you want or the radio station you want or whatever, so people will use the train if it suits them, but if it doesn't, they just desert it.

DENNIS SEWELL:
A decade ago, Richard Branson had a dream - a dream of high-speed tilting trains whizzing from Manchester to London, beating the airlines door to door.

CHRIS GREEN,
Virgin Trains:
The vision was to completely modernise the West Coast Mainline, which hadn't been done for 30 years. When I was managing director of Intercity British Rail, we just couldn't afford to do it, we couldn't get the money out of the Treasury, so he wanted to to get a lot of private money, modernise the West Coast Mainline, get new trains and radically accelerate the journey times. We then fragmented the railway into a thousand pieces which did get the cash but didn't have the organisation to do the work.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Railtrack got years behind schedule and way over budget. The new track authority, Network Rail, say they've learned a lesson.

IAN McALLISTER,
Chairman, Network Rail:
One major reason for the overruns on the West Coast Mainline is whether the scope was properly determined before it was started. Remember, this started a few years ago and we are having to deal with it now. A large element of the costs is incurred because we're having to build effectively the railway while continuing to run trains along it, and that's very difficult to do.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Meanwhile, those existing trains are famously late. For many passengers, Virgin is a dirty word. But Richard Branson's dream should be realised next year. The Pendolino - the very squeak of travelling chic. When the rail lobby want money out of the Government, they usually cite the need to counter social exclusion. But a seat on Pendolino will cost as much as one for Rigoletto. Transport industry sceptics are beginning to question why it is that the railways get so much taxpayers' money to ferry business travellers about.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN GLAISTER:
I don't feel that what the Government did after Hatfield dealt with what they perceived to be the real problems. The real problems were a lack of long-term money for long-term maintenance, possibly a lack of real discipline on the network owners at that time, Railtrack - now Network Rail - to do the job that they are supposed to be doing, to put the railways into good long-term condition. It certainly didn't deal with the problem of congestion on the network.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Some services are already being cut back to let others perform more punctually.

RICHARD BOWKER,
Chairman, Strategic Rail Authority:
In Manchester, for example, the heavy railway was converted - in fact it is still being converted - into a light rail, a tram network. The result is a better service, a more frequent service at lower cost, transport working in an integrated way. The tramway network in Manchester is hubbed around two of the biggest stations in Manchester, so it all fits, and buses interlink as well. That's good transport, that's integration in practice.

DENNIS SEWELL:
So partnership can work. But when it comes to the big decisions, is anyone really in charge?

PROFESSOR DAVID BEGG,
Commission for Integrated Transport:
Our transport system is much more fragmented. A large number of train operating companies who are separated from the track provider, a large number of bus operators, a large number of relatively small local authorities who don't deliver transport in a wider travel-to-work area. If you go to Germany and look at the Lander system and go to Bavaria, which covers the city of Munich, you have one large regional authority that controls everything - buses, trains, trams, economic development, land use planning. It is much easier in that system. So we have questioned whether Britain has the right institutional structure of government to deliver on this new transport agenda.

DENNIS SEWELL:
The Government hoped that by improving public transport they'd get congestion under control. But public transport hasn't got very much better and congestion is worse. Last December, the Government reviewed its own progress toward delivery.

PROFESSOR PHILIP GOODWIN,
Former Government Transport Adviser:
This was the first time that the Government - indeed any government - actually said, "Even if we are successful in every single project that we've promised, congestion will still get worse year by year for the next ten years." And governments have never said that. If we want to make congestion better over the next ten years, and if we want to improve the environment over the next ten years - which I believe is completely possible - something more has to be added that hasn't been apparent so far as high profile in government transport thinking.

DENNIS SEWELL:
That missing ingredient is some form of charging for road use - congestion charges in cities and tolls or some other form of pricing on big key highways. On this at least the experts seem to agree.

PROFESSOR DAVID BEGG:
The most anti-car strategy of all is to allow congestion to grow and not to introduce measures such as congestion charging.

DENNIS SEWELL:
Look at the trend. At the moment the real costs of motoring are going down, while the costs of public transport are going up. So the Government might have a plausible case for charging. This isn't a new idea. It was there in the 1998 transport white paper. London's mayor has gone ahead and done it. Other cities already have the powers to do it too. But the Government is in charge of strategic roads.

PROFESSOR PHILIP GOODWIN:
The Government has said that it will not institute a charging scheme this side of 2010. Some people interpret that as meaning, yes, but they might do it in 2011 or 2015, and some people interpret it as saying, we never will at any time in the foreseeable future. Sooner or later, that ambiguity has to be resolved.

DENNIS SEWELL:
It seems the Government has an awkward choice, either to risk announcing ahead of the general election that it plans to charge motorists for using the roads or to go into the election saying things can only get worse.

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Jeremy Paxman spoke to the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling. He began by asking him whether he was going to cut road congestion by 2010 as the government had promised.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.