WHAT OF THE ROAD FUND?
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The Jockeying of the Motor Community into a Weak Position. The Check on Essential Road Work Created by Treasury Action and Policy.
By Edward S. Shrapnell-Smith, C.B.E., M.Inst.T MHE watchmen of our interests may well be asked, _L "What of the Road Fund?" Is the answer inevital3ly to be that it has gone for ever" or only that it has merely "temporarily disappeared "? Sir Robert Bird, Bart., member of Parliament, who grew up with his father as a pioneer motorist, recently put two questions to Ministers on these points, and obtained answers of ominous import. I quote the full text of both :-
Sir Robert Bird :—To ask the Minister of Transport if he will state the position of the Road Fund as at March 31st last, after allowing for the transference of £12,000,000 in accordance with the Budget resolutions.
Captain Viscount Curzon :—I have been asked to reply. It is not quite clear what information my hon, friend requires, but the terms of the Budget resolution show that the proposal is to transfer a sum equal tO the total of the cash balance and investments of the Road Fund as they stood at March 31st last.
Sir Robert Bird :—To ask the Minister of Transport if he will state the amount of the estimated expenditure from the Road Fund during the current financial year in respect of payments towards cost of maintenance and improvement work on class 1 and 2 roads; payments towards cost of maintenance and improvement work on unclassified roads; payments towards commitments on road Works for the relief of unemployment; payments towards commitments for new or other improvement schemes; and any other payments towards the cost of highways or bridges.
Colonel Wilfrid Ashley :—The sums to be allocated from the Road Fund to the different purposes indicated in the question have not yet been finally determined.
The Road Fund's gross income has grown very rapidly since the war. Here are some guiding figures which show this:— Year Amount.
1920-21 £9,432,302 1922-23 £12,802,754 1924-25 ... £16,150,554 1926-27 £21,393,000
Until the Budget of 1926 the average motorist, unaware of the internecine inter-departmental fight for control of the unexpended balances, thought all was well as he read of the commitments, grants and invested reserves. Then came Mr. Churchill's frontal attack of last year, the while he "played" the A.A. by dangling before their leaders' eyes the bait of a change to the petrol tax. This clever move, which I never believed to be sincere, split the motoring bodies as a deputation, in that it produced deviation from the only true course of a single-purpose, united stand against violation of pledges concerning the Road Fund and in specific opposition to the threatened spoliation of that fund. That opportunity, then sacrificed, can never occur again.
Treasury experts conferred with the legal advisers of the Government, and the Roads Act of 1920 was construed, as events have proved, to permit—if Parliament concurred, as it did—moneys raised for avowed purposes to be otherwise expended.
The second "raid "—the larger one, of this year— was a comparatively easy matter. The bad precedent was there, and a state of impotency was imposed upon both the-Roads Department of the Ministry of Transport and its Minister.
Official statements by or on behalf of Mr. Churchill indicate an intention on the part of the Government to make provision for roads on a scale to which the euphemistic and qualitative word " ample " is applied. It is understood that not less than £18,000,000 will be rendered available during the current financial year. Is it enough? Is it, or is it not, to be provided, and, which is more to the point, spent.
All is, to my mind, an enigma. Nobody seems to know. Certainly, nobody tells. The Minister of Transport cannot answer. The pending reshuffle of duties has in part suspended the Ministry's animation, Time alone can prove whether or not another fictitious surplus is being got ready for appropriation. I fear the worst—a series of lean years for roads, which forebodes an industrial, nay, a national, handicap which is hard to express in terms of mere £ s. d.
The circumstances are grave. Road and bridge im provement have been adversely affected and set back. A hiatus has been created in the programmes the country over. Votes for roads are to lapse if unexpended at each March 31st, which in practice renders administrative work next door to impossible. What and where is the remedy?
The remedy lies in united action. Whilst it is highly
improbable that roads and road transport can ever be made a political issue, much can be done by concerted steps between motoring and local authority organizations. The latter, which are very powerful if they once resolve to move, feel that their grievance is greater than that of the,motor owners. They speak for the great body of ratepayers, and now have to choose between (a) retrogression of road standards, (b) obtaining their due from the Road Fund, or (c) finding the money themselves. I feel confident that, the money, in fact, having been raised from motor owners, local authorities will not hereafter complacently see it again "filched from under their noses." But, in order to prevent-a repetition of the 1926 and 1927 transferences, they must be urged to push on with their road programmes and to impress upon their Parliamentary representatives the disgust which they feel about the treatment of late meted out to them. Also, the lapsing at each March 31st must not be marle a rule or condition.
Every owner, every driver can bear a hand to the
desired end. The Standing Joint Committee of Mechanical Road Transport AssociaSon,srecently enforced the point that there are now in Great Britain upwards of 2,500,000 owners, owner-drivers and drivers of road motors of all types. Here, surely, is a sufficient nucleus for the inspiration of local governing bodies in the matter of getting on with their highway work and refusing to abide by the new rule of lapsing grants. If only one ire six of the 2,500,000 acts as one hopes a greater proportion will, there should not be a local councillor in the country who does not make their sense of bad treatmen-t his own, and would therefore become one of those pledged to take active steps to ensure that the Road Fund is expended upon the legitimate objects for which it exists The sequence of events during the past 18 months has been barefaced and cynical. The Minister of Transport has been twitted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer upon his Department's inability to spend the Road Fund, the while the withholding of Treasury sanction has been at the bottom of the alleged inability