End of a love affair: The Government has always favoured more roads and more cars. Now doubts are creeping in. Geoffrey Lean reports

IT WAS supposed to be an impressive show of government unity. John Major had lined up eight ministers, four to the left of him and four to the right, to present his 'future agenda' for the country at the scene of Britain's most conclusive leadership challenge, the execution of King Charles I in 1649.

As they took their seats on Tuesday in Whitehall's Banqueting House - outside which the decent but inadequate monarch went bravely to his end 345 years ago today - they looked suitably composed, and dull. They gave no sign that they had just been caught up in an unholy row.

The 'heated discussion' (as colleagues describe it) had been simmering for months, and goes to the heart of the environmental strategy unveiled by the Prime Minister. It reflects the emergence in government circles of what amounts almost to a heresy. For the first time, questions are being raised about one of the Conservative Party's most potent totems - the liberating, convenient, proliferating, polluting and congestion-causing car.

The argument involves the two staunchest sons of the Church on the Tory front bench.

Robert Key, the Roads Minister and son of a bishop, is still a true believer. 'I love cars,' he said last year. 'I loved my father's cars and my mother's cars. I adored and worshipped my MGB. I love cars of all shapes and sizes. We must start thinking in terms that will allow them to flourish.'

But John Selwyn Gummer, the Environment Secretary and the son of a vicar, has been increasingly emphasising the car's drawbacks, and despite objections from Mr Key and his boss the Transport Secretary, John MacGregor, he has succeeded in injecting his scepticism into government policy. Continuing traffic growth - says one of the reports launched on Tuesday as the Goverment's strategy for implementing the decisions of the 1992 Earth Summit - 'would have unacceptable consequences for both the environment and the economy of certain parts of the country'.

That is an unprecedented and revolutionary statement for a government that was only recently lauding the 'great car economy' and that is embarked on the greatest road-building programme since the Romans. And the bulky Mr Key, known to his less respectful officials as the Colossus of Roads, finds it hard to stomach.

The row erupted in Mr Gummer's office during the dress rehearsal for the launch, a regular event before set-piece press conferences, when ministers practise facing the press by answering questions thrown at them by their own officials. Mr Key grew increasingly incensed at the replies, and launched into a vigorous defence of the car, only to be bluntly told by the Environment Secretary that he was wrong. He tried again at the press conference itself, only to find that the Prime Minister backed Mr Gummer. 'People,' said Mr Major, 'may not always be able to make the same journeys as easily or as cheaply as before.'

Though the reports launched last week produced virtually no new proposals for action, these two exchanges - in the Secretary of State's office and beneath the chandeliers of the Banqueting House - may just, environmentalists hope, be the first faint signs that the Government is beginning to fall out of love with the car.

There are more such signs in the three ugly and disintegrating concrete towers that constitute the environment and transport departments in Marsham Street. In the northernmost tower, senior environment officials dealing with pollution and the countryside are increasingly aware of the destruction wrought by road traffic, which is now the single largest contributor to air pollution and one of the greatest threats to wildlife sites.

In the centre tower, which houses the environment department's planners, officials have been quietly tightening up the country's planning restrictions and trying to use them to reduce traffic growth. And even in the southernmost tower, the citadel of the hitherto recalcitrant Department of Transport, an unfamiliar breeze of fresh thinking is beginning to blow.

The transport department is undergoing no fewer than four reviews of its fundamental policies and assumptions. It has abandoned or shelved an unprecedented number of road schemes in the past year (most recently by deferring plans for bypasses around Aylesbury and Wing in Buckinghamshire, identified by Panorama as part of an East-West expressway across the country). And it is belatedly looking into schemes for restricting traffic in towns by the use of road pricing, under which drivers are charged, in one way or another, for using city streets.

Still more significant, the department finds itself under pressure from the Treasury. The last Budget cut spending on the road programme and pledged to increase taxes on petrol by at least 5 per cent a year for the indefinite future. This little-noticed measure will, if maintained, double fuel taxes every 14 years.

MEANWHILE, in the House of Commons Conservative MPs are increasingly demanding changes in policy. Last week 12 of them, led by Sir Geoffrey Pattie and Sir Michael Grylls, called on the department to abandon its plans to widen the M25 to 14 lanes. Some 200 local protest groups have sprung up around the country to fight road schemes, many of them in traditional Tory areas. John MacGregor, having lost his reputation as a 'safe pair of hands' has, the Independent reported last week, told friends that he wants to leave the Cabinet in the next reshuffle.

In the leafy quietness of Oxford's Boar's Hill, an old man is writing a book provisionally subtitled, I Told You So. Just over 30 years ago, Professor Sir Colin Buchanan's seminal report, Traffic in Towns, warned in vain that the growth of car ownership posed a 'national emergency'. Now, at 86, he feels that he is finally being vindicated.

Still spry, both in mind and body, he lovingly takes down a copy of his report, still kept in the cardboard originally provided by HMSO. 'I think,' he says, 'that we put together all the anti-environmental effects of motor traffic - noise, pollution, accidents - for the first time. We said this is a social problem of the first order.'

The report, published in November 1963, showed how towns could be turned into delightful places to live and work once commuting by car was restricted, and made suggestions on how it could be done in Newbury, Leeds, Norwich and London. It advocated road pricing, permits to enter towns, strict parking restrictions, and improving public transport.

It warned: 'The pressures that are now developing are such that, unless the greatest care is exercised, it will be easily within our ability to ruin this island by the end of the century.' On the other hand, 'recreating the urban environment in a vigorous and lively way could do more than anything to make it the most exciting country in the world, with incalculable results for our welfare and prosperity.'

Sir Colin pops into the next room, returning with a red binder containing the 35,000 words he has written of his new book. This reproduces a letter from Sir Ernest Marples, the Minister of Transport who commissioned Traffic in Towns, which says it 'is going to make a tremendous impact on the country'.

A few pages on, Sir Colin gives his verdict. 'I had hoped,' he writes, 'that we had put the environmental case so strongly that it could not but lead to governmental action and legislation. But, alas, over 30 years not much has been achieved that I could honestly attribute to our report.'

Since he wrote those words, he has grown more hopeful. 'It has taken three decades for it to dribble through, but I think it is finally coming now.'

He gets angry, however, at the protesters who call for a reduction in the number of cars, rather than simply wanting to control them. 'The thing is just too damned essential,' he says. 'I have got two motor vehicles - a Volkswagen Golf and a Bedford motor caravan. I am not giving them up.'

Sir Colin speaks for almost all of us. A survey published last week showed that eight out of 10 of us - and an even higher proportion of teenagers - see cars as essential for modern living. But at the same time, we rank protection of the environment as our third concern after security and safety; six out of every 10 of the young think the use of cars should be restricted for this purpose.

People like cars, even if cars do not always like people. 'The real way to travel] The only way to travel]' exclaimed Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, published in 1908, the year after Sir Colin's birth. 'Here today; in next week tomorrow] Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped - always somebody else's horizon.'

Yet today Professor David Pearce, the environmental economist who has advised two secretaries of state, reckons that the 'social costs' of cars are almost double the revenue they bring to the exchequer. And that is surely an underestimate. Who can put a price on the health of the one in seven of our children stricken by the asthma increasingly linked with exhaust fumes? Or on the great annoyance that traffic noise, by the Government's own admission, causes to more than five million Britons? Or even on the 160 key wildlife sites threatened by the road- building programme?

Over the past 50 years car travel has increased twelvefold while transport by train, bus and bicycle has declined. In the early 1950s the roads carried less freight than the railways; now they take nine times as much. Though Britons have fewer cars per head than their French, German and Italian neighbours, they use them more, largely because public transport is so poor (and carries a low social status) in this country.

If the Department of Transport is to be believed, things will get worse; it predicts that car numbers will more than double in the next 35 years. Of course, it is not to be believed; John Adams of University College, London, has calculated that the department's crude projections, if taken to their logical conclusion, would ultimately produce enough cars to jam a motorway from London to Edinburgh 257 lanes wide. But it is the predictions that lead to this absurdity that are used to justify the pounds 23bn road- building programme.

NOW, at long last, the department is reviewing the way it makes these projections and involving some of its critics in the process. It is also reviewing the road programme itself. The Treasury is reviewing the department's expenditure. And a fourth review is about to concede that new roads generate traffic, rather than relieving it - an old, long-rejected argument of the environmentalists.

It is also beginning to look at controlling traffic better. Some ideas are red herrings, in environmental terms. Charges for using motorways, for example, are likely to be low, because ministers fear that high charges would simply push traffic on to country roads. This means that they are merely a revenue-raising device.

Last month the Government concluded its first test of road pricing, in Cambridge, using a sophisticated system that would charge people for causing congestion. But though various county councils, including Lothian, Strathclyde, Avon and Hampshire, are considering road pricing, none intends to introduce it - even though it works in some cities abroad.

Politicians are acutely aware of its unpopularity. 'I don't expect to have people dancing in the streets at the prospect of road pricing,' said John Major on Tuesday. And although it may relieve town centres, it can make matters worse elsewhere; businesses and shops would be encouraged to move to the outskirts and customers would have to drive even further to get to them.

The most promising work is being done jointly by the Departments of Environment and Transport. Almost unnoticed, the Department of the Environment has been quietly changing all the policy planning guidance notes - which determine the shape of future development - that were issued by Nicholas Ridley, introducing greater protection of the environment. The two departments will produce a joint policy in spring, entitled PPG 13, which will set out ways to make travel less necessary in future.

John Gummer, an enthusiastic backer of this process, describes this as 'building for people and not for motor cars'. The idea is to allow people to retain choice, when the increasing tax on fuel makes driving more expensive. By ensuring that homes, schools, workplaces, shops and doctors' surgeries are nearer to each other - and near public transport routes - people would be spared the need to make long, expensive road journeys. The Government reckons that it might cut car travel by 15 per cent in 25 years' time.

This might do something to mitigate the effects of increasing tax, but only over the long term. And it will do little to help people scattered in the countryside.

It would be wrong to get too excited about the new thinking. There may have been some different rhetoric on Tuesday, but there were no new policies. This is still the Government that deregulated buses, driving people off public transport on to the roads. It is pressing ahead with rail privatisation, which will probably have a similar effect. It remains a party of the private car - and so, for all its protestations, does Labour.

As David Hall, Director of the Town and Country Planning Association says: 'Politicians of both main parties get nervous to the point of paranoia at the thought of restricting the car.'

When the Prime Minister called on Tuesday for ministers 'to think on a far longer timescale' on the environment, we were witnessing the laying of a very thin-shelled egg . If it is to hatch into meaningful policies capable of changing the country, it will need longer than the two or three years before the next election.

Take one look at the heavyweight Roads Minister and the bulk of the interests he represents and you have an impression of the odds against that egg remaining intact.

(Photographs and graph omitted)