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introduce the desired changes and innovations. Fourth, it has a strong focus on bus franchising as an example of policy creation in adverse circumstances particularly in GM, with a brief overview of other transport modes. The final section of the chapter analyses the achievements and failures of the metro-mayors in their initial terms of office which casts light on the powers and resources of the metro-mayors in this area of individual ‘hard’ power. Overview Most of the issues in transport policy are similar
Britain’s railways are broken. They no longer serve the needs of passengers or the general public. Train services are unreliable, too often delayed, too expensive and complex to use, and marred by strikes. This book takes the reader on a journey to discover how years of under-funding and privatisation have deprived the public of a usable rail system. It is only through understanding how Britain’s rail system has been broken that we can know how to fix it. As it shows, fixing the railways means going beyond simple demands such as ‘renationalise the railways’ and asking instead ‘what do we want the railways to be for’? It is only by attempting to answer this question that we can rebuild the rail system into something that genuinely meets people’s needs. The answer is far from straightforward, but this book argues that, if they are to be useful, the railways must be part of the solution to the twin crises of the climate emergency and social inequality. This means significant increases in government investment, but the current state of the railways stems largely from successive governments’ unwillingness to properly fund them, mostly to protect the wealthy from tax increases. Given the uneven distribution of political power in Britain and the rigidity of public policy, those who want to see the railways fixed have no choice but to fight to take rail policy out of the hands of the political and financial elite who have led us into this mess.
lack of debate, arguing that the environment was at best an ‘afterthought’ in making the new policy. Transport policy and global warming British transport policy was, for decades, formulated on two key assumptions: first, private car use would increase as income grew, and therefore it was necessary to expand road capacity; and second, public transport would decline, and therefore government expenditure on it would be reduced (Rawcliffe, 1995: 29–30; Goodwin, 1999). Rapid motorisation at the expense of other transport modes by proportion, as shown in Figures 8.1 and 8
As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.
study should provide insights into the conduct of Basque and central government relations in more routine aspects of EU decisionmaking. The chapter begins with a review of autonomous community, state and EU competencies in rail transportation and Basque government collaboration with other Atlantic Arc 96 European Union and accommodation of Basque difference regions. Following sections examine domestic interest aggregation and the efforts of Basque and Atlantic Arc regions to influence EU bodies. The mosaic of European transport policy Transport policy
-waste economic society, and the need to rethink prevailing lifestyles, based as they were on mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal. In 1994, the Basic Environmental Plan under the Basic Environment Law set forth a new framework for energy and transport policies, although it did not set numerical targets (EA, 1994a: 73–6). This chapter looks at policy integration specifically in the areas of global warming and energy and transportation. There are inevitably overlaps with the previous chapter, but the primary concern of this chapter is whether and how global warming
aspects of it, as to break policy down in this way will help us to understand whether policies in the two countries are similar or different and to make analysis systematic. The four aspects to be looked at are: • the speed of policy change; • the content of policy, including the choice of policy instruments; • the degree of integration of global warming concerns into the policy areas of energy and transport; • policy stringency. The speed of policy change gives insight into how responsive a country is to a particular policy imperative. Policy contents, including the
to the impact of air travel on climate change. The two sentences of its manifesto devoted to aviation simply stated that its ‘guiding objectives’ in the domain of air transport were to be ‘fair competition, safety and environmental standards’, before adding that it ‘want[ed] all British carriers to be able to compete fairly in the interests of consumers’.1 Its transport policy priorities lay elsewhere, namely the reversal of the Conservative road-building programme; following widespread protest against that programme, its reversal had become the public benchmark of
(Majone, 1989: 116–44). The politics of a carbon tax will, therefore, be fully discussed later. Policy integration Chapters 6 and 8 showed that there were sharp differences between Japan and Britain in the pattern of political processes surrounding attempts to integrate global warming considerations into the energy and transport policy areas. Table 9.3 lists the main factors driving and constraining policy integration in the two countries. Japanese policy integration was controlled, in contrast to more dynamic British processes. In Japan, energy policy-makers, in
created by increased working from home). 10 Before moving on to think about what rail needs to do, we need a basic understanding of how the transport system as a whole will need to change to achieve rapid decarbonisation. A reduction in higher-emitting forms of transport will necessitate an increase the provision of other lower-emitting forms. In the language of transport policy this is known as ‘modal shift’, and planning for it means not treating each transport mode as a separate policy silo. Figure 5.2 breaks