We all hate roads. They pollute our lungs, destroy our hearing, degrade the environment and are a blight on the countryside. Driving on them can be a fraught experience, and it is a given that living next to a busy road is highly undesirable. Yet somehow, despite all these obvious negatives, governments – both Labour and Conservative – always seem to successfully justify huge road-building programmes that are all too willingly paid for by the Treasury.
The Labour government must swiftly resolve this contradiction. It has inherited a massive road-building programme estimated to be worth up to £27bn, enough at least to fill a good proportion of the famous £22bn black hole. Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, is a minister in a hurry; indeed, her motto is “move fast and fix things”. However, the very ambiguity of that phrase highlights the dilemma. Building roads is presented by its powerful supporters as the best way to move fast.
But does it fix anything? Conventional economic thinking is that roads are the lifeblood of the economy, essential for boosting efficiency. Yet the evidence of 100 years of transport policy based on this notion is that road building is a pointless, Sisyphean task. A generation ago, a report by an obscure government committee, Sactra (Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment), found that adding capacity to the road network simply encourages more people to jump into their cars, thereby quickly filling up the new lanes and ensuring that congestion is in no time as bad as before.
A bit late, perhaps, but now is the time to take that notion on board. The Labour government has put growth at the heart of its economic agenda and there are many within its ranks who believe that road building is the path to prosperity. The mistakes of the last Labour administration should not be repeated. When Labour took office in 1997, there was a fierce debate between the supporters of building new roads and their opponents, led by the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott, who argued in favour of sustainable and public transport. Initially, Prescott seemed to be winning the debate, publishing an ambitious plan, Transport 2010, that promised new tram schemes, increased investment in rail and better integration between different modes of public transport.
However, most of these schemes were reined back and eventually those he called the “teenyboppers” in No 10 shifted transport policy back on to the supposedly tried-and-tested “build more roads to deal with congestion” agenda. The result is all too obvious – congested highways and byways, and higher demands for further expansion. It is a never-ending cycle, well illustrated by those dystopian US cities that are crisscrossed by ever-wider highways. In the UK, urban motorways were rejected several years ago as a solution to city congestion – but nevertheless the default position in favour of road spending remains.
Now there is a once-in-a-generation chance to change things. The substantial pot of money in the budget for roads has prompted Haigh to order a rapid internal review into her capital programme, which is due to report in early autumn. So far, this has been kept deliberately hidden from the public gaze in order to avoid the predictable “war on motorists” headlines in the rightwing press.
The Transport Action Network, which has long campaigned for sustainable transport as an alternative to roads, has identified a series of road schemes that could be scrapped with little adverse economic effect. Already a couple of major projects, the A303 tunnel around Stonehenge and the A27 Arundel bypass, have been ditched by the chancellor, but the campaigners have uncovered a list of 16 further major schemes, estimated to cost more than £15bn, that could be scrapped.
The largest of these is the massive £9bn Lower Thames Crossing that, under the benefit cost ratio methodology used by the Department for Transport, which tends to favour road schemes above other transport projects, barely offers any net economic benefits – a ratio of only about £1.20 over the next 30 years to every £1 spent.
Other schemes offer even fewer net benefits, and even the best has a ratio of only about three to one. In contrast, many cycling schemes offer benefits of five or 10 times their cost.
In addition, there’s a series of local schemes funded by councils with support from the Department for Transport that are also in the campaigners’ crosshairs, notably the £274m Norwich western link and the £140m Shrewsbury north west relief road.
Scrapping most of this programme would represent the most radical shift in transport policy in a generation. Haigh will have to present the move away from road spending carefully, stressing support for filling potholes, while questioning the need for new roads. Most fundamentally, she will need to challenge the slavish adherence to the long-established notion that investment in bypasses, dual carriageways and wider motorways is essential for the health of the economy.
The big difference between now and the previous Labour administration is the far greater importance attached to the problem of climate breakdown. There are other pressing reasons to get people out of their cars that have more resonance today than in the late 1990s, such as the obesity crisis that threatens to paralyse the NHS.
While it will take courage to stand up to the inevitable reaction from the motoring lobby, that is easier now than it was when Labour was last in power. Tackling the climate crisis is no longer seen as a fringe issue and attracts far wider public support. With net zero entrenched as a key priority in government policy, the shift away from road building could be a vote winner as well as having economic benefits. If fuel payments to pensioners can be cut, surely road schemes with dodgy economics and negative environmental effects can go the same way.
Christian Wolmar is a transport commentator and author of The Liberation Line, the story of the railwaymen who rebuilt the railways in Europe after D-day
