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New study reveals true extent of Government’s
roadbuilding programme

Date: December 13, 2000
Our ref: 780

A new study(1) has revealed the true extent of the Government’s roadbuilding programme announced in recent documents including Transport 2010: The 10-Year Plan.  The study compares Labour’s trunk-road building plans for England for the next 10 years with actual levels of completions under the Conservatives between 1979-1997.

Labour has frequently stressed that it rejects the ‘Predict and Provide’ approach to roadbuilding, pursued for many years by the Conservatives, in favour of a more sustainable transport strategy.(2)  As part of this strategy, ministers have announced that new roads should be “a measure of the last resort rather than one of the first,” and have revised the methods used to appraise new road proposals accordingly.(3)

But Dr Jon Shaw and Mr William Walton, of the University of Aberdeen, calculate that the equivalent of at least 170 trunk-road building schemes are currently provided for by the Government.  This equates to an average of 17 schemes per year over the next 10 years.(4)

Yet because many of the proposed schemes will not start until at least 2005, Dr Shaw and Mr Walton conclude that by towards the end of the next decade (2005-2010), the average number of completions per year under Labour could be higher than under the Conservatives (around 30 per year as opposed to 29).

The authors recognise that the new road building proposals are made in the context of significantly increased levels of overall transport spending.  For this reason, they argue that the new policy can not strictly be regarded as a continuation of ‘Predict and Provide’, but instead represents a new approach which they call ‘multimodel pragmatism’.(5)

New study reveals true extent of Government’s roadbuilding programme.

Nevertheless, when accurately quantified, the extent of Labour’s U-turn on trunk-road building policy for England is dramatically exposed.

Dr Jon Shaw can be contacted on 01224 273837 or 07941 435449 (j.shaw@abdn.ac.uk).
Mr William Walton can be contacted on 01224 272321 (w.walton@abdn.ac.uk).

ENDS

Issued by the Public Relations Office, University of Aberdeen, King’s College, Aberdeen
Tel: 01224 273778; Fax: 01224 272086

Ref: 780
13 December 2000
 

Notes to Editors

(1) “Labour’s ‘third way’ in trunk-roads policy for England: an emerging Multimodel Pragmatism?” is to be presented at the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in Plymouth, 2-5 January 2001.

(2) Predict and Provide, in essence, involved planners estimating future traffic levels and politicians sanctioning large road building programmes in response.

(3) See DETR Press Release No 216, 1997.  The Government introduced the New Approach to Appraisal and Multimodel Studies.

(4) There are 41 schemes in the ‘targeted programme’, up to 30 from 44 being considered in Multimodel Studies (it is anticipated that all 30 will be sanctioned) and 360 miles of trunk road widening (average scheme length over the last 20 years has been 3.6 miles, hence an additional 100 schemes).  Interestingly, the estimated total of 170 schemes might be rather conservative, since it is likely that a number of more than 70 local bypass schemes also announced in the 10-Year Plan would probably have been defined as trunk road schemes prior to a large-scale de-trunking exercise in 1998.

(5) Multimodel pragmatism essentially represents an attempt to resolve traffic congestion problems through the balanced provision of public transport enhancement and new roads.  In this sense it is argued by the authors that it represents a new ‘third way’ in transport policy falling between ‘Predict and Provide’ at one extreme and outright car restraint (or ‘New Realism’) at the other.  Although such an approach might be considered to be politically pragmatic it is not necessarily environmentally judicious.

University Press Office on telephone +44 (0)1224-273778 or email a.ramsay@admin.abdn.ac.uk.