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Shake-up for municipal bus transport in Royal Commission plan
Page 30
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PTAs SHOULD BE TAKEN OVER, SAYS LOCAL GOVERNMENT REPORT
from our political correspondent • Road passenger transport services should be concentrated into bigger units, and the Passenger Transport Authorities set up under the Transport Act 1968 taken over, says the Royal Commission on Local Government in England, in a report presented to Parliament on Wednesday.
The Royal Commission chairman, Lord Ratcliffe-Maud, calls for the big transport shake-up as part of its plan for giving the country's local administration "a new structure and a new map".
It proposes that England should be divided into 61 new local government or "unitary" areas, each covering town and country. These should be grouped together with Greater London, in eight provinces, each with its own provincial council.
Although the Prime Minister welcomed the report in a Commons statement, there will be no legislation on it during the life of the present Government, Parliamentary time is too short.
The report says that in 58 of the areas a single authority should be responsible for all services. In the special circumstances of three metropolitan areas around Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, responsibility for services should be divided in each case between a metropolitan authority, whose key functions would include transport, and a number of metropolitan district authorities with responsibility in other fields.
Provincial councils would be elected by the authorities for the unitary and metropolitan areas (including, in the South-East, the Greater London authorities) but would also include co-opted members.
Key function of these councils would be to settle the provincial strategy and planning framework within which the main authorities would operate.
The commission defines transportation as "transport planning, the design, construction and maintenance of highways, traffic management. control of parking and the provision of public transport". Only the Greater London Council is at present being made responsible for this total function, but other local authorities with severe traffic problems are groping towards it.
"We assume that, as soon as local authorities exist which are capable of handling it in its entirety, all will be expected to do so."
All aspects. of transportation must be controlled by the metropolitan authority. Unified policy and execution are essential; and they must be in the hands of the authority responsible for planning.
The metropolitan authorities for Merseyside, SELNEC and the West Midlands and the unitary authority for Tyneside should take over responsibility for passenger transport services from the PTAs. In each case the area covered by the PTA would be less extensive than the area of the respective metropolitan or unitary authority.
This was not surprising. The Act was primarily concerned with the immediate problems of operating passenger transport services in areas where the need for rationalization was urgent and the existing pattern of local authority areas totally unsuitable.
"We, on the other hand, have been considering units to be administered as coherent wholes for all purposes of planning and transportation, and when local government is reorganized on the basis of such units they will provide the most appropriate areas for authorities in charge of passenger transport," says the commission.
"The precise areas of passenger transport services must be left to the authorities concerned to settle with their neighbours, but these services are essentially part of the whole group of functions comprised under
continued on page 38