Are Trams Socialist Page 4

  The inquiry was abandoned and the road never built.

  The road lobby, however, had not gone away, and there were repeated attempts to kick-start a major programme of road building. In London a series of four assessment studies were published in the late 1980s looking at ways of bringing dual carriageways and motorways further into the centre, but fervent opposition and awareness of the high cost meant they came to nothing. With the exception of the M11 Link and a few minor schemes, building new roads in London was now untenable. Margaret Thatcher, ever keen on helping the motorist, published a White Paper, ‘Roads for prosperity’, which set out ‘the biggest road building programme for the UK since the Romans’. (Politicians love these fatuous claims – every announcement of rail investment is ‘the biggest since Victorian times’.) While parts of it, such as motorway widening, have gone ahead, much of it was never started because of opposition not just from hippy road protesters like the famous Swampy, who lived in a threatened forest for a time and ended up briefly writing a column for the Daily Mirror, but also from Conservative blue-rinse ladies in rural areas that would have been affected.

  In fact, oddly, it was a victory that did most damage to the road lobby cause. The government had proposed a cutting through Twyford Down, a beauty spot in Hampshire, near the South Downs National Park as part of the M3 to replace the Winchester bypass. After furious protests, which turned violent at times, the road was completed but the environmental damage it has caused, effectively destroying a small hill and a plateau of grasslands, is all too obvious for miles around. The battle of Twyford Down may have been lost, but in many respects the war against further massive road building was won there. Any roads protester only has to point to a photograph of the Twyford Down cutting, with the lovely landscape scarred permanently by a stream of cars and lorries, to destroy any ministerial promises that a particular scheme will not be as damaging as ­protesters claim.

  Twyford Down cutting.

  Source: photo by Jim Champion (see page 115 for full details).

  Following the completion of this section of the M3, the Conservative government, which at the time of the Twyford protests argued that it was planting lots of trees to mitigate the impact of new roads, became reluctant to push ahead with further schemes as damaging as Twyford Down. Indeed, the intellectual underpinning of the roads programme was severely damaged by the publication of a report in 1994 by the obscure but influential Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA). The report found that there was strong evidence that new roads attracted more vehicles onto them. The M25, completed in 1986, reached the traffic flows predicted for 2000 in just eighteen months. In other words, by providing extra road capacity, more journeys, and consequently more traffic, were generated. This greatly undermined the case for new roads because it distorted the cost–benefit ratio analysis. That is because the benefits, in terms of journey time savings, are exaggerated, since if some of the journeys would not have taken place without the new infrastructure, then it is a fundamental error to argue that time savings are made as a consequence. As the SACTRA team concluded:

  These studies demonstrate convincingly that the economic value of a scheme can be overestimated by the omission of even a small amount of induced traffic. We consider that this matter is of profound importance to the value for money assessment of the Road Programme.¹⁵

  In other words, the way roads were valued in the methodology used by the Department of Transport was fundamentally flawed.

  By and large it began to be accepted that the era of major new roads was over. The motorway network was essentially considered complete, apart from the odd link, and while a few bypasses or schemes to sort out junctions were still being built, most subsequent additions to the system have been ‘improvements’, which usually means widening or adding lanes. New roads in urban areas, which required demolition of buildings, were no longer being proposed.

  And this is where there has been the most fundamental failure. Although it has been recognized that it is no longer possible to add capacity – we are not going to get the sixteen-lane highways of Los Angeles or Beijing – the obvious policy responses are either to constrain demand by encouraging alternative modes of transport or to charge for what is an economic ‘good’ that is in short supply.

  Let the train take the strain – or not?

  However, the subsequent policy response to the opposition to roads and to the findings of SACTRA has been muddled, to say the least, and often contradictory. The obvious environmental, economic and social requirement to reduce road traffic has, at times, been a stated aim of government, but it has always been expressed in the context of not wanting to affect motorists. Crucially, no clear common intellectual thread can be detected from the subsequent vagaries of transport policy that has been buffeted by external forces. It is the failure to learn from history and develop a coherent way forward that has characterized successive regimes at the Department for Transport.

  Throughout the period when the emphasis of transport policy was on trying to provide for the car, the other modes were in decline. Without any coherent transport strategy or any proper understanding of the limitations of untrammelled motorization, the policies on the railways were muddled and incoherent. In the interwar period, the rail industry was under the control of four private companies, which were the result of an enforced amalgamation when the railways were returned to the private sector in the aftermath of World War I. Facing competition from the lorry, the coach and later the private car, and hamstrung by tight government regulations that forced them to be ‘common carriers’ (that is, they were forced to transport any load offered to them, including circuses and farm removals), none of them were particularly profitable. This meant that their ability to invest and to respond to changing market conditions was constrained, although there were some successes, such as the much-improved expresses on the lucrative London–Scotland routes and the electrification of most routes on the Southern Railway, which not only sped up services but also increased capacity and reduced costs.

  After World War II, when the railways were again temporarily nationalized, the Labour government decided to take them permanently into state ownership, where they remained for nearly fifty years. Initially after nationalization they were starved of funds, having to compete with the huge investment needs of post-war Britain. Then something surprising happened. The Conservative government of the mid 1950s decided to modernize the railways, not because they were particularly supportive of them but rather because they perceived them as being important to industry. Given that times were still tough, it was a remarkable move: the cost was £1.24 billion (around £26 billion in 2016 prices) and the importance of the railways, in the face of rising car ownership and increasing road haulage, was declining. The plan used a scattergun approach, attempting to modernize all aspects of the industry, and focused very much on capital schemes: thirty huge new marshalling yards, at a time when wagon load freight was seeing the most rapid decline; shiny new locomotives (174 different types of diesel locomotives were to be tested to find the best ones); and enhancements to tracks, such as a flyover at Bletchley that was never used because connecting lines were closed. Electrification of the West Coast Main Line and various London commuter routes were probably its most useful contribution, but much money was ­wasted. Most importantly, the idea that this once-and-for-all boost to the railways would ensure that it could then become profitable was a pipe dream. Railways, as I have mentioned before, stubbornly refuse to play the conventional economic game of making a return on capital.

  The failure of the ‘Modernisation Plan’ led to a complete U-turn in relation to the railways. Suddenly, with Ernest Marples installed as transport minister in 1959, the solution was to cut back the dead wood on the railways: a task carried out – under orders – by the infamous Richard Beeching.

  In his report ‘The reshaping of British railways’, published in 1963, Beeching stressed that the railways were a very unbalanced network. A qu
arter of fare income came from just thirty-four stations (approximately 0.5% of the total), while at the other end of the scale half of the remaining stations produced just 2% of passenger income. Critics of Beeching’s approach have pointed out that this was a dishonest way of assessing the industry. David Henshaw, author of a critical assessment of Beeching’s legacy, suggests a similar examination of roads would reveal a similar imbalance:

  The vast majority of minor roads would have been deemed uneconomic. The density of road traffic was spread just as unevenly as rail traffic.¹⁶

  It is a telling point, and illustrative of a key failing of thinking on transport policy throughout the modern era.

  Beeching’s terms of reference, which were to find a way of returning the industry to profitability as soon as possible, were such that his recommendations were inevitable. His report envisaged a huge programme of retrenchment, with the result that 2,363 stations (more than half the total number) and 5,000 miles of line (just under a third) were closed. What was less inevitable was the enthusiasm with which the Labour government, elected in October 1964 partly on a manifesto promise to halt the closures, set about implementing Beeching’s proposals, even shutting some lines that had not been earmarked in the report.

  Of course many of these closures were justified but they were carried out without any clear strategy about what the rail industry was for, and were instead purely focused on making the railways profitable. In the event, Beeching’s savings were of the order of £30 million annually, while losses were more than three times that level – these figures are not definitive, though, because of the opaque nature of British Rail accounting methods.

  The Labour government of the late sixties did, however, recognize the need for a more systematic approach to rail policy. The result was Barbara Castle’s 1968 Transport Act, which, for the first time, acknowledged that the railways needed financial support from the government to maintain lines that were socially useful. This created a distinction between loss-making and profitable lines. Closures slowed to a trickle after the 1968 Act and stopped completely by 1977, and since then only the odd redundant mile or two has been shut and there have been no threats of major closures. In fact, quite the opposite. More than 500 miles of railway and 370 stations have been reopened in the past fifty years, and there are many campaigns across the country seeking more.

  The lack of closures was not, though, for want of trying by significant groups of British Rail managers and civil servants in the 1970s and 1980s. In their two recent books Holding the Line and Disconnected!, Chris Austin and Richard (Lord) Faulkner have uncovered a series of attempts to undermine the railways and make major cuts to the network in the thirty-year period between the Beeching era and privatization. Most shockingly, a secret conference of civil servants and politicians was held, without British Rail’s knowledge, in Sunningdale in 1977 with the explicit aim of drawing up a massive closure programme. There was also the Serpell Report, published in 1982, in which one option suggested cutting back the whole network to a rump of 1,600 miles (out of 10,000), but this was killed off rapidly after British Rail pre-empted its publication with a judicious leak. The last throes of the ‘shut it down’ brigade was the attempt in the late 1980s to close the Settle–Carlisle railway on the spurious grounds that it was too expensive to maintain – a plan that was eventually killed off by a spirited campaign by local opponents and the arrival of Michael Portillo, later to become a true rail buff, at the Department of Transport in 1988. Faulkner and Austin summarize the period by suggesting that, while the build-up to the Beeching report is well known,

  what is remarkable – and shocking – is the discovery of just how determined the railway managers and civil servants of particularly the 1970s, and also the 1980s, were to reduce the size of the network with which they were entrusted, even after public opinion had turned against major closures, and politicians had wisely followed them.¹⁷

  Again, this demonstrates the incoherence of government policies on the railways and on transport in general. While there was seemingly, at last, a recognition of the social value of trains, the policy as put forward by the department never seemed to fully reflect that.

  The privatization of the railways in the 1990s has only added to the confusion over their role. The ideologues behind the sale thought that selling off the railways would not only result in their becoming profitable – thereby obviating the need for any subsidy – but would also enable the government to withdraw from responsibility for their operation. Both notions proved to be incorrect. The railways still receive around £3.5 billion per year in subsidy, largely to fund investment but also to support loss-making services, and government is as involved as ever, partly because of the need for subsidy but also because the railways are a key part of the nation’s infrastructure.

  Today, there is at least a recognition of their value. Indeed, just as building new roads has become very difficult in the current climate of public opinion, closing rail lines is also politically impossible. The railways have cross-party support and investing in them is now seen as axiomatic for the growth of the economy. All three main parties support the construction of HS2, a £50 billion project to build 335 miles of high-speed line linking London with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, and the railways have a £38.5 billion investment programme covering the five years from April 2014, which involves major sections of electrification. However, it has proved difficult for the state-owned Network Rail to deliver this investment programme, and there are suggestions that it may need to be reined back. Nevertheless, there remains unprecedented across-the-board support for the railways.

  No bus to hop on

  Until 1930, the bus and coach industry was unregulated. Motor buses, which had started operating in the first decade of the 1900s, became universal after World War I when numerous small bus companies were started by ex-servicemen. There was intense competition in many towns and cities but less so in London, where the London General Omnibus Company had achieved a measure of dominance. The major companies – Thomas Tilling, British Electric Traction (a bus company despite the name) and National – gradually took over many smaller concerns, and the Road Traffic Act 1930, which introduced regulation into the industry, resulted in further consolidation. London’s bus service, which stretched thirty miles out from the centre with its Green Line coach routes, was effectively nationalized and run as part of the enormous newly created London Transport.

  After World War II, the state-owned British Transport Commission acquired most of the bus companies. There was not, as was the case with the railways, a forced nationalization but – with both central and local government keen to preserve services in the face of the decline in passenger numbers resulting from greater car use – by the late 1960s most services were either state or local-authority owned. The 1968 Transport Act formalized the position, creating the National Bus Company to run all local bus services in England and Wales except those in London and in five major conurbations where services were under the control of newly created Passenger Transport Executives.

  The need for ever-increasing subsidies, as passenger numbers continued to decline, and the dislike of state-owned enterprises led Margaret Thatcher to break up the National Bus Company and open services up to competition through the 1985 Transport Act. Famously, the transport minister of the time, Nicholas Ridley, had the notion that individual bus drivers could buy their own vehicle and operate it themselves. He was wont, when touring bus garages, to suggest precisely that to rather bemused drivers. The deregulation did not work out like that. While for a few years there were bus wars on lucrative high street routes in several towns and cities, which often attracted negative publicity (and some of the buses appeared to date back to World War II), five major bus groups quite rapidly emerged, and they tended not to compete with each other as they had tacit agreement not to encroach on each other’s territory. A handful of municipally owned companies, notably in Reading and Nottingham, managed to stave off the blandishments of
the major groups and survive. The emphasis in the main, however, was on competition. Anyone with an operator’s licence could start a bus service with just six weeks’ notice, and with very few requirements other than safety measures being met. Even the radical Tory government remained too wary to allow a free-for-all in London, where services remain regulated, operated under management contracts set by Transport for London, which determines the routes and frequency and retains all the fare income.

  Despite thirteen years of Labour government, and much pressure from various local politicians, Labour did not re-regulate the provincial bus services. It created the potential for ‘Quality Contracts’, which would have placed greater social obligations on the private companies, but it made it so difficult for local authorities to implement the policy, with massive safeguards for the private operators, that none did so.

  Consequently, in most towns and cities, the private operators run the profitable routes but, unlike under the old municipalized system, no longer cross-subsidize the loss-making services in the network. Consequently, these are tendered out by local councils, who have to make up the shortfall in income – something they are finding increasingly difficult to do. It is in sharp contrast to many European cities where whole systems are franchised out, in much the same way as in London, thereby ensuring that the network is specified by the public authority. The bus companies argue that this stymies commercial innovation and market responsiveness, but, as the surviving municipally owned bus companies show by frequently winning awards at industry events, they are often able to combine good service with commercial acumen.