Angela Watkinson

Conservative Party | Upminster

Road and rail transport

This speech was part of a debate in the House of Commons.

Angela Watkinson (Upminster): This has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate. I shall concentrate my remarks on the private motor car. Indeed, I shall celebrate the private motor car, if that is not too new Labour an expression. There is another new Labour expression. Until my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) spoke, I had intended to comment that we have not heard the new Labour soundbite "integrated transport" mentioned once. I have always been intrigued to know what it meant. Now I do. What used to be called integrated transport is now called a multi-modal study. That clears that up.

Government must offer a realistic choice between public and private transport. Most people would choose to use both from time to time. Road traffic would then find its own level. There need be no coercion from this anti-car Government to get people on to public transport. The Government's policies are anti-car. The use of the private car is one of life's great freedoms. To travel from and to wherever one chooses, at a time that one chooses, in the company one chooses is an enormous freedom. Public transport can never match that, but there are occasions when we shall all need it. Indeed, some people need to use it all the time, so the need for a good public transport system is undoubted.

The Government are not happy with people having too much freedom and choice. They cannot control them, so they place as many obstacles, costs and difficulties in the way of motorists as they can. Still, the first major purchase of any young person when they have an income, the first thing that they save up for, their pride and joy is their own motor car. It brings an independence incomparable with any other way of travelling. The challenge for any Government is to provide a road network to meet people's need, not to engineer people's needs to suit Government policy. We must have a road network that will allow vehicles to travel from A to B quickly and safely. There is growing demand, and it will not decrease.

Rob Marris: The hon. Lady speaks about engineering demand to suit Government policy. It was the Government whom she supported who rightly introduced tax differentials to persuade people not to buy leaded petrol. That was the kind of social manipulation that she decries. I support it, and I think she would have supported it at the time. It was wonderfully successful.

Angela Watkinson: Lead has an environmental implication, but the volume of traffic on the road is a different issue. We must allow everybody who needs to travel the choice of mode of travel, so that road traffic will find its own level. The largest increase in the use of the private motor car is among pensioners and older people, particularly older women—77 per cent. of older women hold driving licences and use cars. It would be a brave Government who took away or sought to curtail that new-found freedom and opportunity and the fundamental improvement it brings to lifestyle.

We have high road tax and proposed new motorway tolls, which I know are under consideration, although no decisions have been made. The persecuted motorist has become the milch-cow of the nation. We have the highest fuel taxes in Europe. The total tax take from motorists was £45 billion last year. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us what it was spent on. It certainly was not spent on the national road network.

My hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms), who is no longer in his place, commented that even when we have new roads, the Government cannot resist interfering with them and putting traffic lights on roundabouts and junctions, which inhibit traffic flow. There is a case for traffic lights in those circumstances to be used only at peak times and to be switched off the rest of the time or adjusted according to traffic flow. Anyone who has worked for or served on local authorities, as I have, will know how much time and taxpayers' money are spent on what is euphemistically called traffic management.

Of course, road safety is paramount and local authorities have a serious responsibility for road safety, particularly in the vicinity of schools, residential areas, shops or anywhere where pedestrians want to cross the road and come into conflict with motor vehicles. A Labour Member—the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), I think—mentioned the problem of traffic around schools and the changing habits of getting children to school. When my children went to school in the early 1960s, it was quite safe for me to see them across the road outside my house, and then they walked, probably up to three quarters of a mile, unsupervised and unaccompanied. I did not worry all day whether they had arrived and whether they would come home safely. Times have changed and parents are too worried to allow their children to do that now.In many families both parents work. The mother, as well as the father, needs to get to work, so that necessitates taking the children to school by car. The problem is not as simple as it sounds.

Mr. Greg Knight: Does my hon. Friend agree that when one considers traffic management measures, it is increasingly becoming clear that speed humps are not the answer to the problem? In cases where speed humps have been put in place, almost 90 per cent. of the population who originally wanted the speed humps want them removed because of the increase in noise and pollution that they cause, as vehicles slow and then accelerate away after they have negotiated the humps.

Angela Watkinson: My right hon. Friend is right. I was coming on to a range of traffic management devices, including speed humps, which are often counterproductive, although they seemed like a good idea at the time they were put in.

Another problem is inappropriate speed limits. If people cannot see the point of, for example, a 30 mph speed limit if there are no side roads from which traffic might join the main road, and if there is no housing and thus no pedestrians, they automatically want to speed. That is just the sort of location where cameras are being installed, and they are a tax-collecting device.

I make a plea to the Minister: will he ensure that, in special circumstances, local authorities can install repeater signs along 30 mph stretches of road? In my constituency, there is a road that has a very bad pedestrian accident record. It has a 30 mph speed limit that applies close to where it is joined by a stretch of road with a 60 mph limit. Motorists do not always observe the change and there have been several nasty accidents. I have already written to the Department about the issue, but will the Minister consider whether, in special circumstances or in the light of a bad accident record, repeater signs can be used in 30 mph zones? My local council said that if it introduced the policy on the road in question, it would have to introduce it throughout the borough, which would be impossible. However, if there were some way of designating difficult spots as eligible for repeater signs, I would be eternally grateful.

I also have grave reservations about cycle lanes. There are cycle lanes in my constituency that no cyclist who has any regard for his life would dare to use, as the lane is too narrow and there is scarcely room for two cars to pass each other in the remaining part of the carriageway. Some cycle lanes are so narrow that I can imagine cyclists who use them being knocked over or having their shoulders brushed by large vehicles. I think that we should be more circumspect about where cycle lanes are introduced.

Bus lanes often cause car users enormous frustration when they are empty but all the other vehicles are crowded into half the carriageway and there is not a bus in sight. When I was an Essex county councillor, on a road in Chelmsford that I used twice every day, I made a point of noting how many buses there were—very often there were none—and how many people were using any bus that I saw. The bus lane was not an efficient use of road space, because on the rare occasions when I saw a bus, it often contained only two or three people. We need to be more circumspect about the use of bus lanes. If a road is full of buses and the buses are full of passengers, bus lanes are justified, but the other side of the coin is the fact that introducing bus lanes for their own sake does not always represent an efficient use of road space.

Mr. Greg Knight: Does my hon. Friend agree that it is ridiculous that some areas have 24-hour bus lanes, but not a 24-hour bus service?

Angela Watkinson: My right hon. Friend adds to the point that I have been making. The issue needs to be considered and we need to bring common sense into making best use of road space.

When I was a Havering councillor, I chaired the local public transport committee. Its members were crusading public transport champions and anti-car in their attitudes, but when I asked how many of them around the table had used public transport to attend a meeting, I found that none of them had done so; they had all used their cars. There is an element of hypocrisy in championing public transport over the private motor car.

Many housing developments, especially in inner cities, are now being built without parking provision on the basis of the theory that people who live near enough to public transport access points such as stations or bus stops will not want to own a car. Even if people use public transport to travel to and from work, many of them want a private motor car for leisure. If housing developments do not include any parking provision, people park in neighbouring roads and annoy everyone else. Again, that is an issue on which the theory is not borne out in practice.

Policy must be realistic and must accommodate cars. They are here to stay and people like them. People who do not drive—the morally crusading and superior "I've never owned a car" brigade whom we have all met—like cars too, but those of other people. How many times have we heard somebody say, "Would you mind running me home as it's not safe to travel on a bus at this time of night and it's not far out of your way"? The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The answer is local policy making to suit local circumstances that is not driven by Government targets and directives on how to slow down the traffic.

That brings me to London congestion charging, which is just another tax on the hapless motorist. Nobody drives in central London merely to annoy the Mayor of London; they do so because they have to. The congestion charging scheme had so little to do with genuine congestion that the mayor had to make the situation worse to justify it—and very inventive he was too. There were road closures, diversions, roadworks and—this was the real brainwave—all-red phases on traffic lights. That cannot be denied; too many people experienced it, including me. Nothing moved in any direction and no pedestrians wanted to cross. Everything would be at a standstill in all directions and the lights all at red, with the traffic piling up nicely in every direction. Drivers were exasperated, fuel was being wasted and emissions were building. Then came the killer punch: "The Mayor of London can cure all this, but you'll have to pay for it."

There we have it—roads for the rich. At a stroke, everyone who could not afford to pay £5 a day to travel in the London congestion zone had to make other arrangements, often at great inconvenience. In fact, the scheme has been too successful. The income is lower than expected, so the zone will have to be extended to recoup the huge setting-up costs, possibly as far as Heathrow. Imagine the large numbers of people approaching Heathrow every day: it will be a wonderful area for tax collection. I am particularly concerned about the Thames gateway area because a huge mixed development is on its way, with houses, businesses and leisure facilities, and that will generate a lot of additional traffic. The area will be a sitting duck for another congestion zone. Upminster, my constituency, which is famously at the end of the District line, has suffered from commuter parking for a long time. Now, it is a park-and-ride area for people who used to drive into London but now stop at Upminster and come the rest of the way in on the train to avoid the congestion charge.

For most of us, life would be impossible without the use of the private car for at least some of our journeys. For example, I would still be trying to complete last Saturday's schedule if I had tried to do it on public transport. Public transport needs to be safe, reliable, clean, affordable and, above all, convenient if people are to choose it in preference to their own cars for getting to work every day or for their leisure use.

We need to improve the roads that we have and to increase our motorway network in economically affordable and environmentally friendly ways in order to build a road system that is fit for the 21st century. Cars are liberating for work, family, leisure and business, and they generate prosperity. The next Conservative Government will recognise that. The persecution of the motorist will end, because Conservatives are not afraid to admit that they drive cars.