So he’s gone. Stephen Byers, formerly Secretary of State for the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions has resigned. And just when I thought he’d never go. You just can’t tell.
Now, all the speculation is about who should replace him. Should it be invisible Charles Clarke? Or should it be Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon? Neither is about to set the world alight. Of the two, Hoon, would seem to have the best credentials to step into Byers’s shoes: not only can’t he manage the news, but I understand he’s rapidly buggering up the armed forces.
But I have got a much better and simpler idea. One that will almost certainly solve our transport problems.
Abolish the Department.
It only goes back to 1919. Before then we had the best railway in the world. We had already built most of the tube. Electric trams, taximeter cabs and motorised buses plied the streets of the capital looking for trade.
And then Transport got a Ministry and a Minister: Eric Geddes. It got off to a bad start – forcibly re-organising the railways and hamstringing their profits. So started their steady decline. And after the bad start things just got worse. London Transport was nationalised halting development in its tracks. Not satisfied with that they then decided to nationalise the whole railway. The decline just gathered pace. And so on and so forth.
Luckily the Ministry’s incompetence was masked by the growth of road transport. But even there motorways were built too late and in insufficient numbers.
Almost every move the Department has ever made has made things worse: expanding the railway, then cutting it; expanding the road network then slamming on the brakes. They couldn’t get nationalisation right. They couldn’t even get privatisation right.
Politicians are not part of the solution: they are part of the problem.
