Seeing the bigger picture: taking transport out the silo

With public sector belts about to be significantly tightened, the best way forward for transport professionals is for them to start thinking of themselves as part of a much larger world, Jacobs Consultancy’s Richard Hibbert explains to LTT 's Rik Thomas

Jacobs Consultancy is the technically-based management consultancy arm of the Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. The transport practice has over 300 full-time staff operating in the UK, the Czech Republic, Italy, the USA, Canada and India. The transport practice is comprised of highly experienced transport planners, economists, modellers, engineers, aviation consultants, operational managers, financial analysts and business consultants. The company provides services to clients in the public and private sectors, as well as financial institutions, including: economic appraisal and business case evaluations; transport demand and revenue forecasting; computer simulation modelling; transport planning, including physical planning, environmental assessment, and wider planning policy issues; and financial planning including financial modelling.

Jacobs Consultancy is the technically-based management consultancy arm of the Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. The transport practice has over 300 full-time staff operating in the UK, the Czech Republic, Italy, the USA, Canada and India. The transport practice is comprised of highly experienced transport planners, economists, modellers, engineers, aviation consultants, operational managers, financial analysts and business consultants. The company provides services to clients in the public and private sectors, as well as financial institutions, including: economic appraisal and business case evaluations; transport demand and revenue forecasting; computer simulation modelling; transport planning, including physical planning, environmental assessment, and wider planning policy issues; and financial planning including financial modelling.

Richard Hibbert see the future for transport professionals involving far more dialogue with their counterparts in other sectors, such as health

Richard Hibbert see the future for transport professionals involving far more dialogue with their counterparts in other sectors, such as health

Amidst the recent uncertainty concerning who exactly would be forming the next government, one thing remained crystal clear – whoever ended up in power would be more or less compelled to make significant cuts to public spending budgets, with transport funding highly unlikely to escape the axe to any significant degree.

Which, on the face of it, would seem to be unambiguously bad news for local authority transport professionals. But, according to Richard Hibbert, a director with Jacobs Consultancy who, prior to moving into the private sector, had accumulated two decades of experience working for local authorities, this is not necessarily the case.

And the primary reason for this, Hibbert says, is down to the slow death of what is commonly referred to as ‘the silo mentality’. Which is not to say that all is well and that things will pretty much continue as normal, likely budget cuts notwithstanding. Indeed, Hibbert warns that the transport professionals on local councils need to start thinking much harder about how they can work more closely with colleagues in other sectors. “We are clearly facing major challenges… and there is a significant issue about how well transport at all levels speaks across disciplines,” he says. This works both ways, of course, and Hibbert observes that non-transport professionals often have as little idea of what transport planning and provision actually involves as transport professionals do of the pressures that other professions are under. “This is quite stark in some places,” he says, “even with professions that you would expect to be relatively well versed in the transport policy agenda, like spatial planners.”

But this bunker mentality is starting to change, he adds, as the realization grows, especially in financially constrained times, that it is ultimate outcomes that matter, not which department in a local council gets how much money. Take road safety, for example. Spending money from the ‘transport’ budget to reduce the number of serious road traffic accidents has an obvious impact on the health service – less pressure on A&E, to put it simply. “But how often do road safety engineers talk to health practitioners about what can be done?” Hibbert asks rhetorically. “It is essential that we talk about what we are all trying to do before we start talking about how to fund it.” In the past, he adds, transport has exhibited a tendency to work on its own priorities in isolation and then gone with its begging bowl in hand to other sectors to ask for funding. “And has tended not to get very far,” Hibbert notes.

“But I think that the coming financial constraints will be the mother of all invention,” he adds. “There has already been a tremendous amount of effort to establish community strategies driven by local or multi-area partnerships but what has often been quite useful dialogue has often struggled to get to shared investment strategies… But now I think that everybody will feel that there is a need to get more done for less and ask themselves how do we collectively develop a shared service delivery strategy.”

Agencies of change

“Inter-agency working has its seeds in often somewhat bureaucratic arrangements,” Hibbert does concede. “But I think they will rapidly morph into something that says, ‘Right, this is a good way to do business, to prioritise our spending, to minimise duplication.’”

This way of thinking has reared its head in a recent study that Richard was involved in as part of the Delivering a Sustainable Transport System programme. “We were asked to take a ‘cross-sector’ approach without any great push from us,’ Hibbert says. “The outcome everybody is seeking is a means to ensure that local authorities can achieve their development targets, build the houses and businesses that they need and do so with a constrained pot of money… This is a good example of where our clients are saying ‘let’s apply a holistic approach’ to achieve the outcomes of what is fundamentally a transport study.”

Hibbert goes on to explain, “Our job is to disseminate the basic concepts and facilitate dialogue between the parties. To a great degree it is an honest broker role.” So why can’t the various governmental agencies and local authorities get together on their own initiative? “Our experience to date is that discussions tend to be more open and productive if they are structured, and facilitated by a third party,” Hibbert says. “If one of the players, whether that is the transport, health or education sectors, or even in some cases the police, is seen to be the leader then there is always a distance in terms of engagement… The idea is just not bought into by everybody in the same way.”

But if transport does occupy a seat at the round table Hibbert believes that this can be a highly effective way for the sector to gain access to the necessary funding. “We are starting to see local authorities talk cross-sector agendas and the more progressive ones are already starting to pool resources,” he says. “What will incentivise this is two things: proof that you can drive out efficiency savings and, secondly, that it is possible to define and then stand by a clear set of policy outcomes… and there will be a growing momentum to do this far more openly and thoroughly as we start to face budget cuts.”

His experience as a facilitator of inter-departmental dialogue, but with a good knowledge of transport’s role in the grand scheme of things, is, Hibbert says, proving essential as the process of greater co-operation evolves. “Quite often the sort of service review investigations that we are talking about are generally driven not by technical services people but by the financial people… whereas the sort of dynamic we are now in is taking us towards not looking at things purely from an accountancy perspective. We are now starting to look at more of a statutory perspective – what does a transport department actually need to deliver, but with an understanding of what the broader financial and policy ethos is.”

Hibbert is keen to rebut suggestions by others that DaSTS studies will turn out to be nothing more than a waste of money if, when they are completed, the funds are simply unavailable to implement many of their recommendations. His contention is that a more multi-departmental way of looking at problems could lead to money coming to transport that might otherwise not have been obtained. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘divert’ – you can imagine the health sector, for example, starting to bang on the table if I did – but you can see more funds ‘deployed’ to transport schemes as a result,” Hibbert says. “DaSTS has evolved. Remember, it was conceived when there were unallocated funds in the DfT’s spending stream… but before most of the studies started it became clear that the spare cash had gone – but this doesn’t negate the need for the work. What DaSTS has morphed into is work to identify what the true priorities are in the context of a constrained ability to spend.”

So, Hibbert contends, DaSTS studies are becoming a method of determining how transport priorities relate to economic regeneration, health, education and so forth, and about how a broad fraternity of stakeholders can be persuaded to accept that there is a need to deliver these outcomes and a need to find a means to deliver them. “This is much more interesting and a lot more challenging than just finding ways to mop up some spare cash,” he suggests.

The subject of accessibility planning is also more important than ever, Hibbert notes. “It used to be a requirement for transport to map accessibility to public sector providers at the same time as another government department was charged with rationalising the number of locations,” he concedes. “But I think that things have really changed here. There used to be a general view that transport was a service that linked other things together but private sector developers, for example, are much more familiar than they were ten years ago with the idea that spatial development decisions need to take account of accessibility.”

Hibbert also believes that ‘soft’ transport measures (whether they are referred to as smarter choices, demand management, or whatever) are becoming increasingly important. “We are seeing an increasing amount of work to look at the potential for behaviour change,” he says. “I think there is a real incentive to look harder at this.”

“The behaviour side of things is starting to expand quite rapidly,” Hibbert continues. “Remember, a lot of this [behaviour change) is pretty well proven by now, thanks to things like the sustainable towns demonstration project.”

Generating revenue

He warns, however, that one of the perennial gripes of local authority transport departments, the conflict between capital and revenue funding streams, is still standing in the way of behaviour change fulfilling its maximum potential to achieve transport policy outcomes. And yet, he believes, this is (finally) changing. “Some authorities have been more successful than others at this,” he says. “The bottom line is that it is all down to interpretation… and more people are finally getting to grips with this problem through greater inter-agency working, for example, by spending more on transport revenue funding and offsetting this against the capital spend on education or health.”

Ultimately, Hibbert believes that we could be heading toward the establishment of inter-agency bodies. “This is a long way off,” he concedes. “But it might be the logical end point, with one possible example being a single, elected mayor and a single set of elected senior officers… At the moment the problem is how you clarify relationships between a series of independent statutory bodies.”

Hibbert notes that there is rapidly increasing interest in the role of ‘alternative’ fuels for road transport vehicles. “A lot of work needs to be done to get to grips with what the real impact of this could be,” he says. “Electric cars, for example, have no obvious effect on congestion but they may do a little bit for climate change… But what are they going to do to the urban streetscape? There is a whole different dynamic to the provision of fuel with, for example, the electricity suppliers entering the market.”

A changing climate

Expanding on the need to consider the carbon dioxide emissions aspect of any transport policy, he then goes on to describe an interestingly paradoxical trend on the way that climate change is simultaneously moving both up and down the political agenda. Whilst acknowledging, on the one hand, that health-based policies to encourage people to walk and cycle more and more emphasis on behaviour change to encourage people to leave their cars at home more often undoubtedly help the climate change agenda, Hibbert also says that policies directly and primarily intended to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from transport are actually less important today than they were a year or so ago. “There is a historic pattern where the emphasis on environmental issues ebbs and flows in proportion to the economic cycle,” he explains. “Which means that, generally speaking, there is currently a far greater focus on rectifying the economic situation.”

“I don’t think many people have yet worked through their policies’ relationship to carbon,” Hibbert concludes. “They may very well have a good understating of the health benefits of more walking and cycling but relating that to carbon policies… no.”