Councils to take lead in planning 20-year policy

TRANSPORT

Labour's much-trailed transport document was finally published yesterday containing a long list of good intentions but providing few details to provide ammunition for opponents.

The party is committed to a 20-year national transport strategy and the tone of the document is unashamedly dirigiste. At a conference in London held to launch the document, Consensus for Change, Clare Short, Labour's transport spokeswoman, stressed the need for an integrated transport policy, one of the hardy perennials of transport planners, and said in an effort to bring this about that each local authority will be required to produce its own 20-year transport strategy. Authorities will be required to "consider how to contain traffic growth, plan the location of new development, enhance public transport, reduce pollution and so on".

In return for making councils set these objectives, the Department of Transport would no longer require such strict controls over local spending plans. In answer to a question about road schemes in Yorkshire, she said it would be up to a local authority to determine how it would meet its targets on pollution and transport growth and "you will determine on your spending priorities . . . We believe that decisions about transport must as far as possible be taken by authorities at the local level" because they are more accountable locally.

While Labour's document has much in common with the Tories' Green Paper on transport published in April - as both parties recognise that a massive road-building programme is not the solution to the congestion crisis - this emphasis on targets and objectives is one of the sharp differences with the Government's policy which is against targets.

Ms Short's document is well within the Blair and Brown strictures for policy. There are no financial commitments on subsidies and while hinting at the odd radical move, such as reducing the incentives for company cars and tightening up the regulatory regime on the privatised railway, it offers few hostages to fortune or to attack.

On company cars, for example, the radicalism of earlier drafts has been toned down so that now the policy is to review taxation policy on company cars rather than setting out specific measures. Ms Short wants to see a shift from taxing cars to taxing their use, and suggests that bigger cars may pay a higher rate of excise duty than smaller ones.

On rail privatisation, she reiterated the commitment to recreate a strong British Rail, but was unable to say what role it would have other than taking over responsibility for franchising from the franchising director. She also failed to specify in what ways the regulatory regime for Railtrack would be tightened.