COULD DO BETTER
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• If a school pupil earned as damning a report from its teachers as did the Department of Transport from its examiners (the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons) yesterday, the average parent would be very worried indeed. That parent would, at the very least, tell its errant offspring to knuckle down — hoping against hope that the school would give the child long enough to improve, and not insist on their immediate removal to another place of learning.
Unfortunately, perhaps, the guardians of the DTp cannot simply use the sanction of sending it off somewhere else, so they must invoke the less-draconian measure of demanding an immediate improvement from what is becoming more obviously a real problem child.
Certainly, there would appear to be real room for improvement, judging from a report littered with condemnations such as "unsatisfactory", "insufficient", "meaningless", "over-optimistic" and "derisory". The committee got through all those epithets, and a lot more besides, just in dealing with matters like the Dip's seeming inability to sort out the running of heavier lorries and their effects on the environment.
As seen by people used to judging such things, the DTp's record on matters like gauging the effectiveness of air suspensions and then encouraging their use; like measuring the effects of heavier lorries on underground services; like campaigning against endemic overloading (especially by foreignregistered lorries), and even understanding lorries in the first place is unsatisfactory, to say the least. The catalogue of failure is laid out in the PAC report for all to see and to marvel at — for most of these criticisms have been voiced for years by both proponents and opponents of the road haulage industry.
It was on these matters on which a hapless very senior civil servant had to sit in front of a committee and concede that, yes, ". . . we have failed. . ." as Sir Alan Bailey had to concede to this committee.
It is only by such candid admissions — and a willingness to accept that the country deserves far better from its Department of Transport than it currently gets — that we can make progress. There is no doubt that the Dip has the manpower, the skills, the resources and the facilities to deliver what the country needs. All that is missing is an urgent commitment to improvement — but in this case it is the guardians who need to make even more improvement than does the child. Without clear and unequivocal support from the Government which controls its policies and its purse strings, the Dip has no chance of exchanging this week's "must try harder" mark for one of "much improved".