The start of 2013 saw a bizarre string of events for the transport industry. Following the first week back at work, Number 10 press officers briefed two Sunday papers – the Mail on Sunday and the Sun on Sunday – that a speech by Cameron due to be given on Monday morning, part of the coalition’s school-sounding ‘mid term review’, would include some top lines of a radical overhaul of how highways are financed.
But Monday came, and Cameron stood alongside Clegg and talked about his ‘Ronseal deal’ and other horrendous soundbites – but nothing on roads. Clearly it took the industry by surprise, and several campaigning organisations had to revise their press releases to ‘absence of roads policy’ in the speech.
The reports, if correct, would fundamentally shift the entire ground on which the highways industry is based. It wouldn’t be surprising if No.10 or the Treasury had got cold feet. The motoring lobby – the Mondeo man – is a crucial element of the Tories electorate, and any concern it could get upset would have to be considered extremely carefully. Either that, or a press officer got a bit over excited (or the tabloids got the wrong impression – although that is unlikely considering one of the reports was written by a senior political editor at the red top).
In the papers’ reports, it was suggested that the DfT’s feasibility study into road user charging, delivered to No. 10, had resulted in a decision to implement ‘pay as you go’ motoring, introduce privately financed and maintained highways in a move that a ‘Number 10 source’ apparently said was similar to what happened to the utilities industry in the 1980s. But the DfT told The Transport Network differently, staying ‘the situation is much more complex that the reports suggest’.
Now it’s the waiting game…the real news will eventually come out. In the mean time, we will all have to sit and guess exactly what the Government has up its sleeve.
