Andrew Sparrow speaks to the transport secretary about road safety, high-speed rail, cycling and using public transport
It wasn't hard to find questions to ask the transport secretary, Philip Hammond. Transport isn't a particularly glamorous government department, but many people have remarkably strong views about cars, trains, buses, airports and cycling.
When I posted a blog inviting readers to suggest topics I should raise, the response was tremendous. Our interview ranged widely, and here are the highlights:
? Hammond claimed cutting fuel duty cut in the budget would not stop the government being "the greenest ever". Tackling climate change effectively had to go alongside supporting growth, he insisted, saying: "Anyone who thinks that you can do sustainable climate change agendas while ignoring growth and jobs is fooling themselves. If the public feels that the climate change agenda is driving a lack of focus on maintaining economic growth and keeping jobs, they will turn against it."
? He defended his decision to reject the recommendation in the North report for the drink-drive limit to be lowered. "You can always improve road safety," he said. "You could improve road safety by making a man walk in front of a car waving a red flag. There have to be trade-offs. It's simply not right to say that anything is an absolute."
? He accused the Sustainable Development Commission of launching a "misguided" attack on high-speed rail. "The benefits that we will generate by this strategic investment in rail are substantial, and they would not be matched by �17bn worth of micro-investments in regional rail," he said.
? He defended the decision to scrap Cycling England. "We don't believe ? and this is a fundamental view of the government ? that setting up a quango and maintaining a quango is a measure of your commitment to an agenda," he said.
? He said he could not remember the last time he was on a bus. "I don't particularly tend to travel by bus. In London, I tend to use the underground," he explained.
? He said he and his Lib Dem junior minister, Norman Baker, agreed "on a surprisingly large number of things".
We met in Hammond's office at the Department for Transport, a short walk/drive (see below) from the House of Commons. George Osborne delivered a pro-car budget and Hammond is seen as a pro-car transport secretary, although he strongly rejected the suggestion that ministers are backing away from their environmental obligations. For Hammond, it's all about balancing competing priorities. If ministers are either ideologues or technocrats, Hammond is certainly a technocrat. As you can see, he appears to view most issues in the transport in-tray through the cost/benefit prism. We spoke for half an hour. Here's how it went:
Reducing car usage
Q: Let's start with a general question. On the blog I posted inviting people to suggest questions, WillDuff [at 11.28am] offered this: "Is the government committed to (or even vaguely interested in) reducing car usage?"
A: We're committed to reducing carbon, and those two things are not quite the same. In our urban centres, clearly congestion issues point to solutions other than the car. Beyond the urban centres, congestion is still an issue in some places, but carbon reduction has been the big driver of government policy around motoring, I think, over the last few years. The reality is that 84% of journeys are made by car. People in many areas of the country, frankly, have few practical alternative modes for many of their journeys. So the challenge is going to be reducing carbon output from vehicles, and that's why we've got a big commitment to promoting and supporting ultra-low emission vehicle technology, ultimately zero-emission vehicle technology, and we expect to see a huge increase in the proportion of vehicles that are running on electricity by 2020, and then an even bigger jump by 2030.
The budget and the government's green agenda
Q: You say the government is committed to cutting carbon, but my colleague George Monbiot has described this week's budget as "the blackest budget in living memory, from the team that claims to be the greenest government ever" because of the fuel duty cut and other measures.
A: Any government has more than one agenda. It is about economic growth, as well as the environmental challenges, and you have to carry all of those forward all the time. If one of them goes out of kilter ? and, let's face it, economic growth has stalled, and that has consequences for jobs ? that's the one you have to light the burner under. It's a bit like keeping a balloon in the air. You've got to light that burner, get it back on course, then you can trim again.
But anyone who thinks that you can do sustainable climate change agendas while ignoring growth and jobs is fooling themselves. If the public feels that the climate change agenda is driving a lack of focus on maintaining economic growth and keeping jobs, they will turn against it.
You have got to show them that growth and job creation can be compatible with the environmental agenda over the medium and longer term.
Q: George Monbiot's argument, I think, is that being "the greenest government ever" has dropped off the agenda entirely.
A: I think that's very unfair. When you look at things like the green investment bank, the impact the Green Deal will have, the work we are doing in this department on ultra-low emission vehicle and rail electrification ? these are longer-term agendas.
What has the budget done? It has done some medium-term things around supporting economic growth, deregulating to make life easier for businesses, sending corporate tax signals. But it has also done some very short-term things to respond to the pressure that family budgets are under. Government is about balancing the different arguments and different agendas. I don't think he should see that as any lack of commitment to the environmental agenda. Far from it.
Q: So the government is still on course to be the greenest government ever?
A: I think it is, yes. I don't think that means it has to be a government that ignores and fails to respond to the challenges that arise to the growth agenda and the job creation agenda, which are also very important.
High-speed rail
Q: This takes us to high-speed rail. One of the readers who posted on the blog [Matthew Sinclair, from the TaxPayers' Alliance, at 10.51am] wanted me to ask you this: "Why should environmentalists support a project that will spend �17bn and not cut emissions when many other investments would cut emissions at lower cost?"
A: There's a slight misnomer here, "not cut emissions". The average level of emissions based on the current grid carbon density will not go down. The number of seats ? ie, potentially people ? being moved for that level of carbon will go up very significantly. So the absolute carbon output doesn't go down until we decarbonise the grid, which, of course, we have to do.
Then, once you've got an electrified railway, the carbon footprint of the railway will decline as the grid decarbonises. But you are getting an awful lot more seats.
Q: Aren't there things you could do in the short term that would have a much more immediate effect on carbon emissions?
A: Depends what you mean by the short term.
Q: Well, less than 15 years.
A: We have to create this additional rail capacity that HS2 [high speed rail two ? HS1 is the link from London to the Channel Tunnel] is going to deliver. We are going to run out of capacity on the West Coast mainline. So we have to deliver that additional capacity anyway.
It isn't about the �17bn sitting in a pot now, "what might we spent it on", that type of approach. We have to make this investment in additional rail capacity. By going high speed, and by delivering the reduced journey time between cities like Manchester and London, Glasgow and London, we will start to take some significant volumes of traffic out of the air and off the roads, and that is a carbon positive aspect of HS2.
Q: But how will the link to Birmingham take traffic out of the air?
A: We're not going [just] to Birmingham. We're going to Manchester and Leeds. We've made that very clear. This is a Manchester and Leeds project, not just a Birmingham project.
Q: This week, the Sustainable Development Commission said HS2 was a "big vanity project". Andrew Lee, its director, was quoted in the Times [paywall] as saying: "Too much is being spent on these big vanity projects, such as high speed two, and not enough on local schemes that will offer practical benefits in people's daily lives." What did you feel about that?
A: I did read that. What did I think about it? I shall be diplomatic. I think it was misguided.
Q: Why?
A: First of all, we are spending money on local rail schemes. But this is a strategic project and there isn't an option that says "we won't do this strategic project, we'll spend this money on lots of tiny little local rail projects".
This is about transformational change in the way Britain works, bringing the journey time and the effective distance between the northern populations centres and London down, creating greater connectivity in the economy, improving productivity because of that, deepening labour markets.
These are big strategic challenges. And the benefits that we will generate by this strategic investment in rail are substantial and they would not be matched by �17bn's worth of micro-investments in regional rail. People say to me: "Why don't you invest in branch lines?" It wouldn't deliver the same kind of environmental return that investment in the high-speed rail will deliver.
Q: On productivity, Matthew Sinclair wanted to know what assessment you have done of how productive people are when they are on trains. People work on laptops on trains, and so they are not necessarily wasting time.
A: If he had read the consultation documents, he would have seen that we've taken that argument, that was put forward after the previous government's HS2 consultation, on board to a certain extent. I accept that time spent on trains is not entirely wasted time.
What HS2 has done is modelled a series of scenarios using different assumptions about how much of the time you spend on a train is useful and what percentage utilisation you make of time compared to being in the office.
We did a rather uncontrolled experiment the other day and we discovered that, actually, because of the repeated failure of calls when you are on a train, it isn't as productive by a long chalk as time spent in the office. But it is usable. It's not wasted time. It's there for anyone to look at who's interested. [See page 50 of the HS2 consultation document].
The important point is that, if you attribute value to usable time on a train, then you also get pretty quickly to a point where overcrowding erodes that value, because how much work you can do on a train depends on the conditions you're in.
If you're sitting at a table all on your own, you get some pretty good quality working time. If there are four people at the table, there will be quite a lot of things that you can't do. If you're standing in the corridor, almost certainly you won't be using that time productively. Part of the model benefits of HS2 are the reductions in overcrowding on the West Coast mainline.
Q: Because traffic is being taken onto the new line.
A: Yes ? and the West Coast mainline is going to become completely saturated by the early years of the next decade. You will have people standing on trains. You get a compensating benefit [from HS2], in the freed capacity, and greater value of time, for people travelling on the West Coast mainline.
What the antis are hoping to do is to erode the value of the benefit of time saving. But you've got to add in the counter-balancing benefits of improving the quality of the time that people on the West Coast mainline, who will be increasingly overcrowded, will get from the decrowding effect. This is all on the consultation website. They have done the work, and they explain how we rebut the value of time argument.
Q: When will the legislation for HS2 come to parliament?
A: The consultation will close in July. We will respond to the consultation and make our decision in December. There is then, assuming the decision is to go ahead, a big process of drawing up all the technical and design stuff which is required for the hybrid bill process. [Hybrid bills are different from the public bills normally used when the government passes legislation because they deal with decisions affecting private interests. The procedural rules are different].
It would be 2013 before a hybrid bill was introduced. We would expected to have it on the statute book by spring of 2015, just before the general election.
Q: Will government MPs with a particular constituency interest be allowed to vote against?
A: That's not my call. I'm expecting this bill to go through parliament with cross-party support, and therefore it not to be something that will be vulnerable to the parliamentary process.
Q: And are you confident there won't be resignations from government over it? [Last year it was reported that three ministers had threatened to resign over HS2].
A: I hope there won't be. I don't think that's necessary. Those of my colleagues who are in government whose constituents have a strong view on this will argue the case on their constituents' behalf.
It would be a rather harsh constituent who judged that, having vigorously argued the case but failing to carry the day, one had an obligation to resign. I don't think that's a reasonable view at all. I can assure you that those of my colleagues who represent areas affected are ? vigorous would be an understatement ? in presenting their case.
Drink-driving
Q: There were various comments on the blog about your announcement this week about drink-driving. [Hammond rejected the proposal in the North review that the blood alcohol limit should be cut from 80mg to 50mg.] Here's one [from Kevin23, at 2.03pm]: "What argument could have been so overwhelming that it compelled him to fly in the face of the medical community, road safety charity Brake, the parliamentary council for transport safety, the AA, RAC, the transport select committee and the weight of public opinion and to reject the recommendations in [the North report] which experts argue would save 168 lives?"
A: Well, he's wrong about the transport select committee, because the transport select committee recommended that I should do exactly what I've done.
Q: It did say that over time the drink-drive limit should be lowered [in a report published last year].
A: It said that it thinks that, ultimately, in the very long term, there should be an aspiration to get to zero.
Q: Is that your policy too?
A: No, I haven't set out a very long term aspiration. I have dealt with the immediate recommendations of North. But most of those organisations you've listed are focused on one aspect, that is safety. And you can always improve road safety.
You could improve road safety by making a man walk in front of a car waving a red flag. There have to be trade-offs. It's simply not right to say that anything is an absolute. We are in a resource-contained environment.
We looked at how best to deploy the resources available to tackle what are two recognised and identified problems. We have made huge strides on drink-driving already. But we recognise there are still a group of people who are massively abusing the law.
Forty per cent of people who are tested positive are more than two and a half times over the limit. These are not people who went out for a glass of wine and accidentally had two. These are people who went out and drank five, six, seven pints, half a bottle of vodka, and then drove home.
And those people, we do not believe, are going to change their behaviour just because you drop the limit from 80mg to 50mg. They are completely disregarding the limit. The only thing that is going to change their behaviour is the thought that they might get caught.
We looked at the resource implications of lowering the limit, stretching the police resources, judicial resources, much more thinly, and we decided that would not be the right thing to do, focusing the police on people who are at the lowest end of the risk spectrum, currently on the lawful side of the threshold.
What we should be doing is focusing police and judicial resources on the most dangerous end of the risk spectrum, on people who are repeatedly and blatantly ignoring the currently law. That's what we decided to do, with a series of measures that will make it easier for the police to target and deal with drink-drivers, that will close some loopholes in the current law that allow those who understand them and know them sometimes to escape proper punishment for breaking the law.
And the second point is that the offence of drug-driving, which is every bit as dangerous as drink-driving, is at the moment almost entirely unprosecuted, because the police face some quite significant technical challenges in prosecuting drug driving cases.
We decided to focus resources on making drug-driving a more clear-cut offence, hopefully getting to a point where we will be able to set thresholds where exceeding the threshold is an offence, rather than having to prove impairment on a case-by-case basis, which is where the law is at the moment.
Speed limits
Q: Speed limits also attracted a lot of interest on the blog [from readers like birchbiker, at 9.02am]. Do you support the 20's Plenty campaign, which says 20mph should be the speed limit in built-up areas?
A: Not on a blanket basis like that, no. Almost any campaign or proposal that says "you should always do x in every place" is almost certainly going to be the wrong answer.
Things like speed limits, whether you are talking about higher speed limits on motorways or lower speed limits in residential areas, should be looked at on a case-by-case basis.
Q: Do you think 20mph limits should be used more often?
A: This is an issue for local authorities to determine on a case-by-case basis. What we should do is provide them with clearer guidance about how it is appropriate to reach decisions on 20mph limits and they should, in my judgment, reach these decisions by looking in a rigorous way at the costs and the benefits. And they will stack up differently according to what the area is.
Q: What about increasing the speed limit to 80mph on motorways, which is an idea that you have floated ...
A: It's the same issue. It's not about saying the speed limit should be higher or the speed limit should be lower. What I said was that we should have a consistent and rigorous approach to appraising proposals to change speed limits, so that we are looking at all the benefits and all the costs, and then make a decision.
In the past, that is not what has happened. Discussion around speed limits has usually been driven by emotive arguments around, "this could save x number of casualties", without looking at the costs. I come back to the point I made earlier. You could always reduce road casualties by slowing vehicles down.
Ultimately, if you have the man with the red flag, that would dramatically reduce casualties. But you would have some huge costs as well.
Q: For the record, where are you at the moment in terms of reviewing legislation on speed limits?
A: We're going to publish a road safety strategy quite soon. This will be setting out parameters. We are not going to be saying "we think the speed limit should go up" or "we think the speed limit should go down".
We are going to be talking about the way in which these decisions should be approached.
Cycling
Q: Let's move on to cycling. A lot of the readers feel strongly about this. A fairly typical comment on the blog [from jw4g, at 1.07pm] was this: "Why is the government failing to invest in cycling? Is Mr Hammond aware that other European countries invest in cycling for no other reason than it makes economic sense: cyclists on average tend to be healthier, visit their doctor less often and take fewer sick days (saving the NHS and their employers money), while cycling helps alleviate road congestion and air pollution?" There were also complaints about Cycling England being abolished. How would you respond to these comments?
A: Cycling has a role to play in our overall strategy. It's part of the local transport agenda, and Norman Baker is very passionate about the role that cycling has to play. We don't believe ? and this is a fundamental view of the government ? that setting up a quango and maintaining a quango is a measure of your commitment to an agenda.
We've absorbed the cycling agenda into the department's mainstream activities. We don't believe we need a separate quango to do it.
Q: It is correct to say that funding has been cut for cycling, isn't it?
A: We've protected the Bikeability scheme for the remainder of this parliament, which is a very important scheme which trains schoolchildren to cycle safely.
Beyond that, the cycling agenda will be funded from the local sustainable transport fund, which has got �560m over the four years of the spending review period.
Q: Do you cycle yourself?
A: Not in London. I have a bike in my house in Surrey.
Building new runways
Q: You're opposed to new runways and airports in the south east of England. Boris Johnson thinks you're wrong. In January he published a report calling for more airport capacity and at the time he said: "One statistic which should chill business people in the City and the country is London's airport can send just five flights to China a day, Paris sends 11, Frankfurt sends 10." What do you say to that argument?
A: We are focused on the economic competitiveness issues around airports and airport capacity and we are launching a consultation next week on aviation strategy post the decision on the runways to re-engage with the industry about how we can support the industry, but recognising the environment constraints that aviation has to address.
It has to address the carbon challenge. It has to address the local environmental burden that it imposes.
Q: In your mind, is the moratorium on new runways permanent? Or can you ever envisage a time when there might be a case for building another one in the south east?
A: It's an interesting question to pose. Could it ever be the case? I pose the counter question. What would the argument against a runway be if aviation at some point in the future had become carbon-free and silent, or virtually silent?
I assume the objection to runways by rational people is that aeroplanes pollute and create carbon and that they are noisy. It's a bit like the motoring question you asked me earlier. You have to distinguish what we're really fighting.
I think the agenda on aviation is noise and carbon, and some other local pollution effects. It isn't "flying is bad". It's "carbon is bad" and "aircraft noise is bad". And, in motoring, it isn't that driving is bad, or private vehicles are bad.
It's the carbon they produce and the congestion they deliver are the bads we're trying to deal with. It would be helpful to get the aviation agenda focused on what we trying to achieve.
Using public transport
Q: How much public transport do you use personally?
A: Normally when I travel out of London, I travel by train whenever I go on a regional trip. Not normally, invariably. I once went by car to Southampton. But normally we always go by train.
Q: In that case, one of the readers on the blog [ofap, at 4.07pm] asked when did you last travel second class by train, and what was it like?
A: Just over two weeks ago. It was fine. It was a Midland mainline journey from Derby to London. I was travelling with the chancellor.
Q: And he or she asked the same question about when you last travelled by bus.
A: That's probably more challenging. I don't particularly tend to travel by bus. In London I tend to use the Underground. I'm not a great bus user. I could not, offhand, tell you when the last time I was on a bus was.
Q: And do you walk from your office here to the House of Commons [a question asked by greenben, at 12.41pm]?
A: Depends on the timing. I know it sounds silly, because it's not actually that far, but many meetings that I have during the day are in the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. It's not very far away, but it does take in excess of 10 minutes to walk it and, if you've got four meetings a day there, time mounts up.
I've walked there today, for obvious reasons [the weather was lovely]. But other days it's pouring with rain, or meetings are back to back, and we have to use the car.
Q: Do you get fed up with people moaning to you about public transport?
A: More people moan to me about congestion on the roads than moan to me about public transport.
Coalition with the Lib Dems
Q: You've got Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat minister, in your department. How does that work?
A: It works very well. We agree on a surprisingly large number of things, I think rather to Norman's slight disconcertion.
Q: Well, not entirely. He told the undercover reporters from the Daily Telegraph who went to see him that Theresa Villiers, the Tory transport minister, was sound on railways, that you were "more sceptical", but that she could persuade you to deliver "effectively what is Lib Dem policy". Is the department delivering Lib Dem policy?
A: I think the department is delivering coalition policy. I think Norman is wrong about that. I'm a great enthusiast for railways. But I'm a railway realist. People who come to me and say: 'If you're an enthusiast for railways, you have to be in favour of reopening branch lines all over the country', frankly, it's for the birds.
The challenge is to make the railway we've got sustainable. That means reducing the level of public subsidy needed over time and reducing the pressure on fare payers over time. At the moment fare payers are paying fare increases ahead of the rate of inflation. I don't think that's something that they can be expected to go on doing for ever. Therefore we've got to get the cost base of the industry under control. That's my prime focus at the moment.
Q: Would you like to see the coalition extended beyond 2015?
A: No. I would like to see a majority Conservative government building on the success that this government will have achieved righting the damage done to this economy by the previous government.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/25/philip-hammond-interview-andrew-sparrow
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