A sudden swerve from the right: Christian Wolmar sees signs of an end to the Tories' long-standing love affair with the car

AS WHEN any lengthy love affair draws to a close, the parting is set to be painful and protracted. And although this affair is still in the early bickering stage that presages the deeper rift, the Tories' involvement with the car has been particularly intense. The potential break-up poses a huge dilemma for the party which has throughout this century lent its wholehearted support to pro-car policies.

To be sure, John MacGregor, Secretary of State for Transport, is a roads man through and through. He likes telling stories about travelling home to his constituency in Norfolk on a Friday night on clogged roads while trains run alongside, relatively empty. He stresses how, when travelling round the country, most people he speaks to want more roads.

For him, cars and roads are a basic tenet of Tory philosophy. John Stewart of the anti-road campaign federation, Alarm UK, puts it succinctly: 'In the Tory mind, public transport is dirty and communal. When you are young, you have to use it just like you share a flat with friends at university. But once you graduate to driving your own car, the whole idea of public transport is a bit naff, not really grown up.'

But from next door to Mr MacGregor's offices in Westminster, John Gummer, the Environment Secretary, has set in motion a policy that will take the Government in a completely different direction. Planning circular PPG13, issued last week, makes clear that the days of countless out-of-town superstores and housing developments on the fringe of cities far from the nearest bus stop or station are numbered. New developments are to be grouped together and made accessible to public transport, while those that encourage car commuting will be discouraged.

Of course there will be no overnight revolution. But even if the effect of the new guidance is more symbolic than real, it represents a shift within Government policy as radical as the abolition of poll tax. Margaret Thatcher's 'great car economy' is no longer in vogue.

When a draft of the PPG13 circular was issued last year, the Department of Transport refused to endorse it. Last week, however, the DoT was happy to have its name emblazoned on what was a more radical and explicit document than the draft circular. Robert Key, the roads minister, stressed that there was 'not a chink of light' between the Transport and Environment departments on the guidance. As a senior DoE source suggested, a temporary truce has broken out in the long behind-the-scenes battle between the departments.

A resumption of conflict is in the offing, though. Next week, the review of the trunk and motorway roads programme is due to be published by the Department of Transport. While this is likely to result in the postponement of some schemes and the scrapping of a handful, such as the M12 in Essex, the bulk of the programme will survive unchanged. Within the constraints of a limited budget, it will also be speeded up. Mr MacGregor launched the review last August as a way 'to achieve a more efficient and faster delivery of the most important schemes' - in other words, as a way of delivering more roads, rather than assessing their value and their environmental effect.

Mr MacGregor is wholly committed to the Tories' massive national roads programme, currently running at pounds 2bn a year. The policy was launched in May 1989 by Paul Channon, the then Transport Secretary, in a White Paper called Roads to Prosperity, which brought together 500 schemes. It was a kneejerk response to DoT forecasts that traffic would increase by between 83 and 142 per cent by 2025.

But even as Roads to Prosperity was being formulated, cannier transport planners - and even some Tory politicians - realised that the policy was unsustainable. Phil Goodwin, director of transport studies at Oxford University, says: 'As soon as you start examining the implications of that kind of growth level, you realise that you cannot build yourself out of it. For a start, you cannot have much more traffic going through urban areas, which means the growth in rural areas could be 300 or 400 per cent. It's obvious you can't build enough roads to cope with that. From both an engineering and an economic point of view, it is impossible.'

A party more fleet of foot might have taken less than five years and a wave of anti-road building campaigns, backed very often by the Tories' own welly-wearing grass-roots rural supporters, to acknowledge the impossibility of the growth strategy, and begin to reverse the trend. But the Government is now beginning to do that. In its recent statement on sustainable development, it slipped in a sentence to the effect that traffic growth must be restrained.

Dr Goodwin is unequivocal about the significance of the shift in policy: 'There is a genuine sea change in the Tory party and among transport experts in the axioms of transport planning, which is of historic importance. There has been an unreported revolution in thinking.'

He is convinced there will be a policy change: 'The change is taking place for economic and engineering reasons, rather than environmental ones, which makes it much more likely to happen.'

But the roads review ignores this new reality. It is the last gasp of the old regime. The DoT is not going to drop its most controversial schemes, such as widening of the M25 in Surrey or the A303 near Stonehenge. A few bypasses will be ditched, a token political offering to growing opposition within Tory ranks to the road-building programme.

The problem is that Mr MacGregor is still far too bound up in the roads policy to do a public U-turn. He has been clever in getting the idea of motorway charging widely accepted, but if the Tories are serious about a change in policy, it will have to be with a new Transport Secretary.

It may simply be that for the Conservatives the roads issue is a no-win situation. Thus far, the signs of a shift in policy are too vague and slender to garner the party any votes in forthcoming Euro and council elections. But the process of change is accelerating. Some of Mr MacGregor's junior ministers in the Department of Transport are increasingly disillusioned at his attempts to defend a policy that is no longer intellectually credible. There is talk of a White Paper on transport policy, which would create a national set of priorities and attempt to integrate public transport with the car, the first such statement of policy since Mrs Thatcher came to power.

Next week, the DoT will lose its roads division, which will become the free-standing Highway Agency. Mr MacGregor is widely thought to want to leave the department in the next reshuffle. Without him and the roads division, the DoT might merge with the Department of Environment, a move that would usher a completely different style of transport policy which no longer took the primacy of roads to be axiomatic.

(Photograph omitted)