Patrick Kinnersly

Dear Gareth Walters,

Thank you for your letter of 27 February and the earlier letter of 12 December, describing changes to the participation programme.

I have decided that I personally do not wish to take any further part in this process and would ask you in future to direct all correspondence to Pam Rouquette, Co-ordinator of Salisbury District Transport 2000. The group will then decide whether it wishes to continue participating and, if so, who should represent it at future workshops. This leaves me free to give you my personal reasons for withdrawing from this process.

After seven years of campaigning against major road construction in Salisbury and along the A36/46 corridor, and nearly four years trying to promote sustainable transport in this part of the world, I have concluded that the input made by environmental and transport campaigners has no effect whatsoever on the decisions made.

Consider the following examples:

The Salisbury Transport Study

The Government Office for the South-west was instructed to find solutions to the traffic problems of Salisbury without building roads. At the first exhibition in the City Hall the public was asked for its preferences on three strategies. Sixty per cent favoured the two non-road options.

The government has now approved, subject to statutory process, the funding of the Brunel Link and Harnham 'Relief Road' (approximately three miles and £13 million) and has encouraged Wiltshire to develop detailed plans for a four-mile relief road in the Wylye Valley.

Wiltshire LTP

The guidance on LTPs issued to local authorities by the Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions said that roads were to be considered only as a last resort after examining all other options. Integrated transport was to be the priority and consultation was to be central to developing appropriate solutions.

We thoroughly approved of this approach and participated fully. We were pleased to find that stakeholder groups in Wiltshire shared our priorities, ranking investment in public transport first and new road construction last in a list of seven options.

So what happened? Despite our protestations at every stage, the Wiltshire LTP ended up reversing these priorities, putting massive sums into road building in Salisbury and West Wiltshire and trivial amounts into public transport.

Multi-modal studies

While stakeholders make their earnest contributions to 'workshops' it is clear that they are not part of the actual decision-making process, any more than Halcrow is. If you study the minutes and background documents for the South-west Regional Assembly's Transport Sub-group meeting in November you will see correspondence between the Government Office for the South-west, the Highways Agency and the officers of the Transport Sub-group from which it is clear that strategy on transport in the region is developed in an arena far removed from our little workshops and any recommendations that might emerge from SWARMMS or other multi-modal studies. While lip service is paid to 'not pre-empting the multi-modal studies' it is clear that this is what is going on.

A formidable shopping list of roads has now emerged as local authority fantasy schemes, such as the Salisbury bypass, the A4-A46 link at Bath, and the entire Dorset County Council 'back-list' apparently become 'regional policy'.

Without public consultation on the strategic nature of its plans, Wiltshire is pursuing its ambitions for the A350 to become a high-speed route through West Wiltshire. As environmental constraints lessen the chances of Dorset being allowed to extend this new highway to the South Coast at Poole, Wiltshire is switching its efforts to an alternative 'north-south' corridor. This would be achieved by linking an upgraded A350 to an upgraded A36, via an entirely new road at Westbury. The schemes required to create these strategic through routes are, as ever, promoted as local bypasses bringing traffic relief to local communities.

Neither the Regional Assembly, nor the county councils involved in these grand road designs has an equivalent list of strategic rail projects, or bus networks, or freight terminals. Indeed Wiltshire rejected its consultants' proposals for both freight and passenger rail developments in West Wiltshire and has kept its total budget for such items to a thrifty £1 million.

The Highways Agency route management strategy study of the 'route' between the M5 near Exeter & the M27 near Southampton

Mono-modal with feeble gestures towards an unspecified rail network, this curious exercise appears to be predicated on old ambitions for a strategic road corridor along the South Coast. Money has been found (without democratic discussion) for consultants to consult local stakeholders about 'improvements' they might want along the A30/35/31 'route'. No funds have ever been found for the strategic rail equivalent proposed by environmental transport campaigners. The parallel train service (Exeter-Southampton, change at Salisbury) remains a disgrace of single-track working and obsolete signalling. While it can be safely predicted that the Highways Agency will take it upon itself to study the next leg of the south-coast route - Southampton to the proposed bypass at Hastings, via a widened M27 - it is equally certain that no-one is considering how to speed up the rattling crawl along the railway from Southampton to Brighton, Lewes and Hastings.

Democracy

It should by now be clear to anyone with the slightest knowledge of transport planning, sustainable development, or democracy that decisions are being made without reference to rational criteria or to public opinion. For example, in the Salisbury Transport Study, consultants WS Atkins concluded that reopening Wilton railway station 5 km west of Salisbury (a project that had made some progress up the greasy pole of the planning process) would not be good value for money, but it would be justified to spend £13 million on building two roads to get HGVs in and out of the Churchfields Industrial Estate. How many heavy vehicles a day would justify such a project? Thousands? No - around 600. How many of these are actually HGVs? Nobody can say, but it likely that the majority were actually six-tyred vans and small lorries. Only 120 or so actually went through the town; the rest managed the 'very difficult' route to and from the ring road. The estate thrives, attracting the very kind of businesses that one might expect to be inhibited by difficult access - the car dealers whose double-deck transporters cannot pass under Fisherton railway bridge!

At the end of a study reportedly costing £300,000 we still do not know how many of these vehicles enter and leave the estate each day, nor where they come from or go to. No one has asked the car dealers if they could bring vehicles in by rail if the facilities were provided in the adjacent goods yards. So much for the application of objective transport planning methods in Wiltshire! One wonders how many people in Wiltshire's County Hall have heard of SACTRA, let alone its reports confirming that new roads induce traffic growth and may not actually induce economic growth.

If expert opinion is now to be ignored at local and national level, public opinion has fared no better. A MORI poll conducted for the Commission for Integrated Transport and published in July gave results remarkably similar to the Salisbury transport study and Wiltshire LTP consultation: 60% of the population put investment in public transport ahead of investment in new roads (CfIT, 2000).

After four years of a Labour government we still have no public transport equivalent to COBA for assessing value for money of rail and bus projects - let alone a common environmental balance sheet that might allow direct comparison between modes. And in the unlikely event that such criteria had been developed, they would no doubt, like the LTP guidance, have been buried under a spray of loose chippings as the government executed its handbrake turn into Acacia Close, where it imagines, wrongly as it transpires, that the heart of Middle England beats excitedly for Tony 'n' Gus's special pre-election roads offer.

Conclusion

So, to conclude, it is now abundantly clear that transport provision has become once again a purely political process, divorced from rational methodology and actual - as opposed to media-confected - public opinion. Whatever we might 'decide' locally and regionally (for example to upgrade the Salisbury-Exeter railway line), implementation will depend on funding priorities decided elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether Blair's recent "green" speech heralds a further U-turn in transport policy; the spin doctors and political focus groups - not you or I - will decide whether the money should follow the green rhetoric into public transport instead of private transport.

In this situation, therefore, I judge it a complete waste of time to engage in any further consultation on time I can spare for campaigning must follow Labour's U-turn, away from promoting sustainable transport and local, regional or national transport policy. Whatever time I can spare for campaigning must follow Labour's U-turn, away from promoting sustainable transport and back into the sterile oppositional environmentalism of the 1990s. Once again, it seems, our ambitions must be confined to prevention - stopping the worst of late 20th century greed dumping unsustainable infrastructure into the 21st.

I apologise for the length of this letter, much of which is outside the geographical and philosophical limits of your study, but I speak for many disillusioned 'stakeholders' in environmental transport groups, and quite a few of your fellow practitioners. I hope your study will be able to overcome the obstacles I have described and will somehow produce a report that you will not be ashamed to show to your grandchildren.

Yours sincerely,

Patrick Kinnersly.

Notes

The letter was sent to Gareth Walters, the Project Co-ordinator of the SWARMMS Study at Halcrow consultants in Swindon on 10th March 2001. It was copied to the Department of the Environment, Transport & the Regions, Government Office for the South-west and the Highways Agency.

• Commission for Integrated Transport (2000) 'Transport - England's most important local issue' 11th July Press release concerning the MORI survey http://www.cfit.gov.uk/pn/index.htm

• SACTRA (1994) Trunk Roads and the Generation of Traffic Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment, HMSO, London.

• SACTRA (1999) Transport Investment, Transport Intensity and Economic Growth The Stationery Office, London.

• Wiltshire County Council (2000) Wiltshire Local Transport Plan 2001/02 - 2005/06 Environmental Services Department, Wiltshire Co. Co., Trowbridge.

• WS Atkins Planning Consultants (2000) Salisbury Transport Study - Summary of the preferred strategy http://www.gosw.gov.uk/pages/transport/ps_rep.pdf

Keywords: Consultation, democracy, government, multi-modal study, participation, railways, roads, Wiltshire.

Address for correspondence

Patrick Kinnersly
West Wellow, Romsey, Hants, U.K.

Back to top

Reader Notes

All pieces posted here are forwarded for the purposes of education and research under the fair play provisions of copyright law. All non-copyright materials may be used freely for non-commercial purposes, unless otherwise indicated. We ask only that you provide the usual full and proper acknowledgement of your source. If you have a doubt, consult The Commons here.

You will need Adobe Acrobat in order to read these PDF files. The Acrobat Reader is freely available here.

Have you comments, corrections or suggestions on any of the Today pieces available here. Suggestions for additional topics? An idea for a joint article or one that you would like to prepare yourself? Other media ideas? An op-ed piece. cartoon? A song? A play? An web opera? This is the place to let us know. Diversity rules!

ECFD-Postmaster@ecoplan.org

Back to top