A Bleak Outlook: Fingers Crossed that it is Wrong

By Lillian Burns, January 2011

The arrival of a New Year brings with it more apprehension than positive expectation as far as sustainable transport campaigners are concerned. Quite apart from steep rises in many public transport fares and local authority spending cuts which will mean less subsidised services and less local authority officers with the time and the budgets to focus on sustainable travel, we face a dearth of platforms on which to lobby.

However unsure some of us may have felt when regional working was established in the late 1990s, what we soon realised was that because of the requirement for Regional Assemblies to include 40% Social, Economic and Environmental Partners (SEEPs), it gave us a seat at many tables and an opportunity to pitch our case to senior politicians, regional agencies and local authority officers. Here in the North West, the Transport Roundtable built up a good reputation and had many successes in the statutory Regional Spatial Strategy process. We also exercised our democratic rights by appearing at numerous public inquiries and, even where we did not win our case, we often achieved significant improvements to planning policy documents and transport schemes. There is no doubt that the first decade of the second millennium was a successful one for us - and we achieved a lot with little funding.

Unfortunately, as we launch into the second decade of the millennium, the landscape in which we operate is shifting beyond recognition and holds a lot of uncertainties. The planning system has already had a number of changes and faces many more and looks set to be weakened in favour of economic interests and to the detriment of the environment. Regional Spatial Strategies have been scrapped and formal working at the regional level has been all but disassembled with the exception of the odd non-statutory committees. There is no regional government office to look to and, to date, there is no requirement for the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) which are being established to include representation from the environmental and social sectors. Yet it is being mooted that they will be handed some planning and transport powers. When the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee held an inquiry last Summer into what powers the LEPs should have, the North West Transport Roundtable made a submission arguing for a 'SEEP' type representation on each (see the 'documents' page of the NW TAR website, under August 2010) but it would seem that they are all evolving differently and only a few in the whole country have so far indicated they will have any voluntary sector representation at all.

There are no longer any national indicators which local authorities can be held to and Local Transport Plans will not be monitored by the Department for Transport in future. Major transport infrastructure proposals such as High Speed 2 are not going to be submitted to public inquiries, they are to be decided upon by MPs, and all the signs are that private finance initiatives are going to be allowed to 'drive' many other schemes. At a time when the only game in town appears to be doing whatever it takes to avoid economic meltdown, the fear is that arguments about the need to operate within environmental limits will not get a hearing and will be drowned out by calls for unsustainable schemes with superficial cases for economic benefit that would not lead to any modal change, would cause environmental degradation and have negative social consequences. This would be a worst case scenario. Let us earnestly hope that it is not the one that unfolds.

Postscript:

At the time this 'perspectives' article was written, the situation was that the Coalition Government had indicated its inclination to scrap all National Indicators. (See remark at beginning of last paragraph). Since then the Department for Communities and Local Government has announced that it is keeping a requirement for local authorities to comply with some data reporting activities which they have termed 'Data Burdens'. See:
Data burdens - Local government - Department for Communities and Local Government

These do include some two dozen DfT datasets and indicators, which is a most welcome about-turn, but it is still a major concern that highway authorities will no longer be required to demonstrate their progress to such important issues as promoting modal shift.

It is also very unhelpful, from a land use perspective, that the DCLG has done away with parking standards - quite apart from the effect that will have on car ownership and car usage. L.B.