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Mr Walker's vision of a new greatness
Page 23
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• All sectors of transport can together work out a strategy of transport which will give the United Kingdom an advantage over all the other countries of Europe, declared Mr Peter Walker, Secretary of State for the Environment, on Tuesday. He was speaking at the Chartered Institute of Transport's anniversary lunch in London, and he added that the theme advocated by the president. Mr D. E. A. Pettit, of reconciling commercial progress with the needs of a better quality of life, was vital to everyone.
New factors, said the Minister, meant dramatic changes for transport in this country. The motorway network, for example, was not only a facility for freight operators but a challenge to them to use it fully and in the best way. Much traditional warehousing, for instance, was well away from the motorways in congested towns, and this would call for new initiatives from the transport industry.
He was adamant that Britain must have an efficient public transport system, and this, too, posed an immense challenge to State and private operators, not least in capital investment.
The transport industry, he warned, would have to become quieter and cleaner in operation: the new generation would not accept the standards which older generations had tolerated.
Mr Walker said he was determined that the road system should be linked properly to the ports, and he suggested that the very efficient UK rail system which he foresaw for the future would need to develop new physical links with European railways.
He believed that Britain had the foundations for the best transport system in the world. Our only future in a world dominated by military giants lay in a new commercial greatness developed alongside the elimination of squalor and the creation of a better quality of living. In both these roles the transport industry had major, significant roles to play, he said.
In special references to road haulage, Mr Walker declared that the drivers of long-distance lorries. especially on international journeys, were men of calibre and enterprise.