`More than one Minister may be needed
Page 81
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
pERSISTENT rumours have it that whatever the result of the General Election, Mr. Ernest Marples will no longer be willing to remain Minister of Transport. His decision will be regretted by the many people who have come to appreciate the long-term policy activating his frequent, restless probes into the manifold problems confronting him. To the general public he will for many years be still the archetype of a Minister of Transport and they will have difficulty in separating the name from the title. After all, who except the experts can confidently name any other Minister of Transport who has held office since the war?
Whether or not Mr. Marples intends firmly to withdraw from the transport scene after October, he is certainly making a conscious effort in public to round off his five years of achievement. The process harmonizes conveniently with the election plans of the Conservative Party and may. be said to have begun with the publication of a policy booklet on British transport a few months ago. In his foreword Mr. Marples said that his duty and purpose were to make sure that every major aspect of inland transport was treated as a closely related part of a balanced system, and his hand is seen clearly in every other section of the document, which covers the whole field of roads, railways and ports.
More recently, in a paper to the Institute of Transport, the Minister went into more detail about the acts and orders of his five-year reign. Once more he sought to impose a common pattern on the diverse range of achievement and once again he pointed to the philosophy of his party as the best medium for further progress. The right answer, he said, was to leave the choice of transport to the user, who alone knew exactly what he wanted in terms of price, speed, comfort and reliability. Decisions made by a central body substituted one choice for the choice of many and could not reflect the many different factors which decided each individual need for transport.
No one will blame Mr. Marples for trying to leave behind him an unblemished image. Not all the statistics have run his way. Road accidents, for example, continue to increase in number. This is not the fault of the Minister, whose efforts to improve road safety have been untiring. He is justified in pointing out, as he did to the Institute of Transport, that the problem faces civilized countries all over the world and that the 7-8 fatal casualties per 10,000 licensed vehicles in Great Britain in 1960 should be compared with the figures of 15-5 for Western Germany and of 6-9 for Sweden.
So far as the road programme is concerned Mr. Marples has been able to round off the figures nicely by announcing at the opening of the Newark by-pass that for the first time ever more than £1,000 m. was to be spent on construction and major improvement of main roads in England and Wales for the five years from 1965 to 1970. About £575 m. would be spent on motorways and trunk roads and about £340 m. on classified roads. Local authorities would contribute almost £150 m. A Ministry statement
compared the total of £1,065 m. with the previous estimate of £890m. for the five years 1964 to 1969.
With such figures to encourage him the Minister launched a somewhat bitter attack on what he called the "bucket and spade " critics " The vestment of vested interest is a pair of blinkers ", said Mr. Marples. To bolster up their case, he went on, the critics had made great play with the fact that in 1964 only 74 miles of new motorway would be opened to traffic. That might be a correct statement, he said, but was not a reliable index of progress on the motorway programme. A better guide was provided by the actual expenditure, which would be more than £50m. in 1964, appreciably above the figure of £45 m. for the previous year when more than 93 miles of motorway were completed.
The touch of asperity is not merely characteristic of Mr. Marples. The critics with whom he was dealing were mainly the British Road Federation, which gave the figure of 71 miles prominence in one of its recent pubications "Finance and Roads There have been other critics, and many of them have tempered their remarks with the opinion that they would much prefer Mr. Marples to some of the possible alternatives. If, in fact, Mr. Marples and the Government are trying to give some account of their stewardship, they may have hoped that the opposition would have been left at the moment to political rather than sectional interests.
Expectation that Mr. Marples may even now be composing his swan song is heightened when one considers the tasks lying before a Minister of Transport in the next decade. In his paper to the Institute of Transport, Mr. Marples—with a well-deserved reputation for energy and careful organization—spoke feelingly of the many and varied tasks and duties facing any Minister. He was not complaining, he added, and he was not suggesting that other Ministers did not have to shoulder the same burden. It is still true that other Ministers are not prone to catalogue their responsibilities in the same way.
Mr. Marples may himself have given a clue. He compares a Minister to the managing director of a business, who must "get down to the grass roots" if he is to be constructive and radical and must at the same time have a "general grasp of the whole business ". This may apply to some Government departments and it certainly applies to the Ministry of Transport. But it is not necessarily the case over the whole field of government, and especially with Ministries which do not have responsibility for a specific industry or group of industries.
One of Mr. Marples' many achievements is that he has been able to get at the roots of so many of his problems. The outstanding reports which have emerged—and this is especially true of those documents such as the Buchanan Report, which deal with traffic—so far from settling the problems, have opened up new lines of inquiry to such an extent that they may ultimately be beyond the ability of one man to oversee, however talented he may be. More than one Minister may be needed to carry out the tasks towards which Mr. Marples has pointed the way.