A smaller state: where do the transport opportunities lie?

With the new coalition Government pledging to review the role of the state in transport provision, LTT asked a number of practitoners and policy-makers for their ideas on reducing the state’s role.

Their responses acknowledge that there is greater scope for services to be provided by social enterprises, parish councils and even residents groups. But they point out that Whitehall needs to first give some bodies additional powers if they are to provide a greater role in highways and transport, and that councils need to take steps to facilitate an expanded role for other organisations to step up to the challenge.

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“There are may examples where the public sector facilitates services rather than providing them directly. You have community-run transport, where an authority leases vehicles to community groups to put on services. You have community speed watch, where an authority says to residents complaining that there is a road safety problem: we will give you a speed gun, you go off and collect the data to establish what the issues really are.

There is greater scope for local authorities to develop closer working relationships with communities. We think it’d be worthwhile examining devolving some minor maintenance activities to parish councils and active residents’ groups.”

George Batten
President, Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport (ADEPT)

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“Powers for parish and town councils to deliver transport services are currently limited to spending money on community transport schemes, and for highways are limited to issues such as repairing footpaths, providing traffic signs and lighting roads.

“There should be new legal powers that recognise the scope for them to carry out more transport and highways functions. Our councils can be well placed to work with a range of partners to provide services including community transport schemes such as ‘Wealdon Wheels’ in Kent.

“We are lobbying the new Coalition Government to this effect. We want to see if the promised Power of General Competence for local (parish and town) councils will change matters.”

John Findlay
Chief executive, the National Association of Local Councils

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“We wholeheartedly believe that social enterprises can play a part in improving the quality of public services at a cheaper cost to the public purse. However, if we frame the question simply in terms of what services can be cut or what services can be outsourced, we put the quality of life of our citizens at risk. 

“The real strength of getting social enterprises involved is that they can help rethink the whole scope and nature of services from the ground up, with a strong mandate from the communities they serve. A focus on outcomes and incentives is a necessary step to support this. 

Transport services are too frequently commissioned on inputs/outputs in an immersive cycle of tendering, contracting and measuring annual micro-contracts.”

Dai Powell
HCT Group chief executive

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“There’s always room for civil society to provide services for their communities. If they can do it better and cheaper than central or local government then we should always be open to these ideas.

If the users of a service are happy, then there’s absolutely no reason why citizen’s groups, volunteers and business shouldn’t step in to meet the transport needs of local people. We have to get away from a model of either badly run government transport services or heavily subsided private companies.”

John O’Connell
Policy analyst, The Taxpayers’ Alliance

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“Community-run transport schemes can only be successful if they have the necessary support and leadership at the local level and have seed funding. There are examples such as community bike sharing and walk to school initiatives that have worked.

Probably the simplest scheme to set-up is car sharing or pooling, which can be set up through people communicating at the local level about their transport needs. This requires some coordination to be successful. Whether actual cost savings can be achieved is still unclear.”

John Smart
Director of professional & business development, Institution of Highways and Transportation

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“There are issues around the edges where we can look at stuff, certainly in my patch. It may be that you can expand the community bus network for example. I’ve got a fantastic example in my constituency – the Cuckmere Community Bus. We’ve got networks of villages having really good bus services that most of the country has lost. That’s all done on a voluntary basis by a community group.”

Norman Baker
Minister for local transport