Tribune, 27 March 1992
John
Prescott talks to Paul Anderson about
what he plans to do when he takes over at the Department of Transport
When
John Prescott was given the job of shadowing the Minister of Transport, then
Paul Channon, in 1988, there were plenty of people around (including Tribune’s reporter) who interpreted
it as a demotion.
His
previous job, from 1987, had been as energy spokesman, where he was replaced
by the up-and-coming Tony Blair, and before that transport, between 1983 and
1984. Prescott’s move back to transport, the generally accepted story went, was
punishment for standing against Roy Hattersley for Labour’s deputy leadership
at the 1988 party conference: Hattersley was saved embarrassment only because
he piled up the union block votes.
If it
was punishment, however, it soon backfired. No sooner had Prescott taken over
than a series of transport accidents - the Clapham Junction, Purley and
Bellgrove train disasters and the Kegworth air crash - propelled him on to the
nation’s television screens to denounce the Tories for reducing investment and
allowing safety standards to slip. By mid-1989, the pugnacious, plain-speaking
MP for Hull East had a higher public profile than any other Labour
front-bencher except Neil Kinnock and perhaps John Smith.
Since
then, Prescott has been in the news consistently for his energetic harrying of
the Tories over the dilapidated state of Britain’s transport system. He saw off
the unfortunate Channon in July 1989 and consistently got the better of his
successor, the ineffectual and smug Cecil Parkinson. After Parkinson resigned
when John Major became Prime Minister, Prescott had almost 18 months of
humiliating Malcolm Rifkind.
He has
not won over all his former Labour critics. Most obviously. Peter Mandelson,
the former Labour director of communications who is Hartlepool’s Labour
candidate in this election, used his column in the Sunday People recently to have a dig at Prescott for claiming
that the Tories were spreading nasty rumours about his private life around
the Commons press gallery. But most of his colleagues now at least grudgingly
share the Sun’s admiration for
his bluntness, extraordinary energy and capacity for hard work. In short,
Prescott has been rehabilitated.
Now he
is busy on the campaign trail, where his knockabout speaking style, though a
little short on soundbites, does wonders for party morale. At the London Labour
Party rally which launched the campaign proper in the capital a fortnight ago,
he was the only speaker who managed to provoke the rather polite audience into
gales of laughter, and he has since pulled off the same trick at meetings
throughout the country.
He is
looking forward to taking over the Department of Transport from Rifkind on
April 10. Indeed, he brims over with enthusiasm at the prospect of getting to
grips with the DoT - and changing it beyond recognition.
“There
are seven times as many civil servants on the road programme as there are
anywhere else,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. The DoT ought to be the strategic
thinker. The first step is to devolve the roads programme to the regions. The
second is to integrate the Department so that road and rail and the rest think
together what they’re trying to achieve. The third is to produce every year a
rolling programme of infrastructure planning.”
The
view among civil servants is apparently that a Labour DoT would be an exciting
place to be because of the radicalism of Prescott’s proposed shake-up, but how
far it would cease to be the “Department for the Private Motor Car”, as
environmentalists have dubbed it under the Tories, is a moot point.
Most
of Labour’s transport policy reflects the fact that Prescott’s advice comes
mainly from transport experts who more or less accept the environmentalist
arguments that the private motor car is wasteful of energy and a major source
of the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, and that there is no
way of building a road system that can solve the problem of congestion. But
Labour is also under pressure from car industry trade unions which desperately
want, a Labour government to stimulate the currently deeply depressed market
for new cars.
One
crucial indicator of who has the upper hand will be what happens to
road-building if Labour wins. New roads have been at the centre of the Tories’
transport policy for the past 13 years, and just over a fortnight ago they announced
a £750 million boost to the already massive road-building programme. Labour’s
manifesto promises that “within six months we will review the roads programme”
and Prescott emphasises that the review will lead to cuts, even though Labour
“wouldn’t do anything about the contracts that had been signed”.
“The
government has said that the number of cars could increase by 140 per cent in
the next 25 years,” he says. “The road programme it has at the moment increases
road capacity by less than 10 per cent. So you simply can’t build your way out
of the problem.
“That
means you must review the road problem to achieve a better order of priorities
- maintenance, by-passes if you like - plus give a greater priority to the
development of public transport. The party’s priority is to encourage
travellers to shift from the private motor car to public transport.”
Not that Labour wants to plough taxpayers’ money into
subsidising trains and buses or bringing privatised transport services back to
state or municipal ownership: there simply isn’t the money to do it. Instead, a
Labour government would adopt low-cost strategies for encouraging public
transport investment to coax travellers away from their cars.
In
essence, Labour’s plans for improving the railway system consist of keeping
British Rail in the public sector, streamlining its planning, and relaxing the
Treasury rules governing railway investment to allow BR to lease-buy equipment
instead of buying it outright at once, thus spreading costs over several years.
That
is the way continental European railways finance investment, and Prescott is
withering about the Tories’ insistence that leasing is not a good idea. “Their
dilemma on leasing is that they’ve just leased the European sleeper trains and
the freight trains because our European partners said that we’re not into this
silly nonsense of paying in one year. I’ve embarrassed them, right?” he says.
The
emergency recovery programme in the Labour manifesto promises to allow BR “to
proceed with a leasing scheme of 188 new Networker trains on the North Kent
line”, which it describes as “the first step in securing private investment
to help modernise Britain’s railways”.
Prescott
says that the next steps after that will almost choose themselves.
“Take
the inter-city line on the west coast from Euston. That’ll cost about £800
million to upgrade. We’ve already been in consultation with finance houses and
the manufacturers to look at a new leasing deal so that we can pay for it over
10 to 15 years. That means that we wouldn’t have to find so much money
immediately but we’d get the benefit of the investment.
“It’s
the same with the Channel Tunnel rail link, which will cost £4,000 million. We
need a high-speed Channel Tunnel rail link by the end of this decade. The
Tories would take until the end of the next decade. So we’re talking about a
joint public-private operation that may be funded by a bond system like that
used by French railways, which Neil Kinnock has talked about.”
In the
longer term, Labour is keen to see more electrification, a nation-wide high-speed
train network, an outer circle railway for London, major expansions in regional
rail services and a whole lot more besides - but only “as resources allow”, and
the detail on most of these proposals has yet to be worked out.
With
buses, the key to Labour’s plans is to end the instability caused by
deregulation and to introduce a series of measures to give buses priority on
urban streets. The 1985 Transport Act, which privatised the National Bus
Company, forced local authority bus services to become ordinary companies and
to open themselves up to competition from other operators.
Prescott
says that the result of deregulation has been underinvestment and chaos.
“Returning to a regulated system gives you the stability that will allow the
bus companies to raise the money themselves to finance new investment,” he
says. “It doesn’t cost us anything.”
“In
urban areas, the buses could do a lot more in attracting passengers if we gave
them green priority routes. We give the bus priority on
the road, priority at the roundabouts and reduce the journey time. By reducing
the journey time we can increase the frequency of the bus and its reliability,
and the ridership will begin to increase. We’ll not then need to pump money
into revenue support for the urban areas.”
Labour
would do all it could to encourage experiments in urban public transport.
Prescott talks enthusiastically of trying out road-pricing in Cambridge, with
the revenues going to public transport, of metros in Manchester and Birmingham,
of an integrated rail and guided bus scheme for the Southampton conurbation. “We’re
interested in the network,” says Prescott. “We believe in maintaining the
network.”
In
line with this, he is opposed to Richard Branson’s attempts to muscle in on
British Airways’ position as the only significant British airline. “We need a
large British aviation interest to combat the Americans in global competition,”
he says: allowing Branson’s Virgin Airways to undermine the profitability of
BA by running flights to America but not on BA’s unprofitable routes “raises
questions of major importance”.
“Branson
rang me up on a earphone and said did I agree with him going from Heathrow and
I said no I didn’t,” he says. Heathrow itself is already too congested and
then there is the problem of easing congestion on the transport system that
gets people to the airport. “I told Branson, there’s nothing wrong with
Gatwick.
“What
our transport policy is about is simple. The market solution is not an adequate
one. You know, it’s only in Britain that this is an ideological party
argument. Everywhere else in Europe, it doesn’t matter who’s in power, they
accept all these arguments for a role for government, for planning, for use of
public money. We in Britain are on our own. That’s why we’re in such a mess.”
