It’s too early to say how the new Westminster administration’s transport policy will shake out in detail – but we do know what’s making it tick.
In every dream home a heart ache
Housing is the leitmotif for what the new administration wants to do. For the public transport sector the nature of an expansion in new housing is arguably more important than some of what may happen within the transport brief. The big question is whether a significant house building splurge will unleash a new public transport killing spree of car dependent sprawl or whether it will open the door to the kind of new suburbs that put people and the environment first. We know what good looks like – its already there in new suburbs in places like the Netherlands. The question is are we going to build it? Given that the new administration has said it wants housing built quickly and mostly by the private sector mass housebuilders (with their poor record on sustainability and public transport access) – then there are good reasons to be pessimistic. On the other hand it’s early days and there are many battles over the detail still to be fought. If the future isn’t to be one of shrinking islands of demand for bus travel then the public transport sector will need to play its part in these debates.
Bulldozer optics
We are back to the George Osborne era where no sentence was complete without the use of the word ‘growth’. Growth tends to be a code for looking big and busy on the economy and looking determined and cross about anything identified as standing in the way. ‘Growth deniers’ as they were called for a while. Projects and policies which get to wear the ‘growth’ badge tend to involve bulldozers – although they may or may not lead to good jobs for people (road building has the ‘growth’ optics even though road construction is very poor at actual job creation). Growth also hates planning – but loves it too. So planning is a bad thing when it stops us getting what we want (planning is ‘the single biggest obstacle to growth’ according to the Chancellor). But planning is a good thing when it gets us what we want (housing targets are back). There’s a touch of Eisenhower’s America in the vision for the voters of a new home in a new place with a new car on the drive and a new job in cutting edge private sector industries. A sensible world where people will vote sensibly. Meanwhile the dash for international infrastructure investment cash could also lead to PFI making a come back in transport. A more expensive, if off balance sheet way, of getting more things built.
Treasury orthodoxies and predilections are never far from the surface in the new administration’s policies and so capital continues to be seen as a good and virtuous whereas revenue spending is rather more suspect. Hence the demise of England’s £2 maximum fare with claims of compensatory capital investment to make up for the increase to the new and messy £3 maximum. The trouble with capital investment though is its impacts are on specific geographies, it takes time to implement, not everyone wants it in the first place and it’s not clear who really deserves the credit for it. Also the level of capital spending that would be necessary for people to distinguish from the general background level of investment in local infrastructure would have to be an order of magnitude larger than it is now. Whereas revenue-based measures – like fares initiatives have instant and universal impact, it’s clear who was responsible and it makes a tangible difference to the cost of everyday life. To strike a more optimistic note on revenue it looks like local government revenue support is going to be put back on an upward trajectory again – which could feed through into available support for public transport services as well as in attracting and retaining the staff necessary to make more good things happen on the ground. The new administration has been also been strong on its support for ‘real devolution’ and the demise of competition funding. If followed through this would also be of immense help in rebuilding local government confidence and capabilities and help make more good things happen on the ground.
Greening by stealth?
There’s an argument that runs that the new Westminster administration is being savvy about how it greens the country. What it won’t do is go on moral crusades that risk triggering the kind of backlash that is currently ravaging green policies across the Western world. What it will do is go green where it supports good jobs and a growing economy. That is the terrain on which it will fight on carbon reduction and wider sustainability issues – and which ultimately will get more green things done. Whether you accept that argument or not it’s clear that for this Westminster administration the green imperative is secondary to the growth imperative and what it would see as the ‘grown up’ politics of the reality of mass car ownership (hence the fuel duty freeze in the budget – alongside some more progressive changes to the wider vehicle taxation regime). Whilst it’s true that green crusades can come unstuck, without a central organising principle the danger is that the transport brief becomes more vulnerable to drift. It risks becoming the usual bog standard transport policy where every form of transport gets a share of the cash and attention but nothing much really changes or has impact. Meanwhile if the real cost of motoring continues to decline then we risk throwing ever great sums of money at public transport in order to keep it afloat rather than to win back significant market share.
What kind of public control?
The big shift to public control and ownership of public transport has left the private sector providers looking a bit subdued and deflated. Meanwhile it’s not yet clear what kind of public control and ownership we are getting. A public debate on what a nationalised railway should be and do hasn’t happened and its early days on the delivery of regulated buses – but with some promising signs in Greater Manchester that progressive innovation (such as night buses and social fares offers) is starting to be layered onto what was a careful approach to getting the basics right as part of a very successful initial transition. Meanwhile one area of the administration’s policies that hasn’t had that much attention is the package of improved workers’ rights. Strengthening the position of labour could be one of the more significant things the new administration does – as this makes labour less disposable and also encourages capital investment within organisations and companies. It’s also something which could be particularly pertinent to public transport which in someways has become an outlier – with all the other utilities still firmly in private hands.
Get off the streets
Despite the bus industry seeking to give the impression that they are utterly helpless as there are no bus lanes anywhere, there’s actually a lot of investment going into active travel and bus priority schemes. The transition on the paranoid right from fantasies about fifteen minute cities towards creating the conditions for attempted pogroms in the Summer was depressing. However at least it did create some breathing space for those public authorities that had stayed the course to continue to transition streets to places for people rather than private vehicles. There are no signs so far off any backtracking on this by the new Westminster administration. Long may it continue.
Not for the first time then transport is far from the number one priority of a new government. Where transport contributes to the main priority of growth – then all well and good. The greener the better. But there is to be no big green crusade on modal shift per se. At the same time public transport is quite the outlier on public ownership and control. What kind of public control and ownership it will be is still shaping up. So we know the key themes of this administration. The detail is very much up for grabs.
This article first appeared in Passenger Transport magazine. An illustrated pdf of the article can be found here