Review: A New Deal for Transport--Analysis of the Transport White Paper (Cm 3950).

The article presents comments of the author on the transport White Paper. The British Deputy Prime Minister's proposals, as revealed in the July 1998 White Paper, fall far short of the rhetoric one recalls from the 1997 general election campaign, or even of the promises that followed it. The railways are not to be renationalized; the buses are not to be re-regulated and area-wide local authority franchising is not even mentioned. All the same, the politicians' urge to meddle runs throughout the document and the liberty of entrepreneurs to seek out and satisfy demand is still to be overseen by those whom scholar Deepak Lal calls the Platonic guardians. The search for a definitive meaning of the word integration is abandoned in favor of a list of four possible interpretations. There is to be a new Commission for Integrated Transport and there are to be local transport plans will be the key to the delivery of integrated transport locally. So the Commission and the local authorities will have to work out the meaning of the word for themselves. The White Paper is being followed by a collection of daughter papers which might, just possibly, throw more light on the question. A policy based upon an indeterminate concept such as this can hardly be expected to make things better for everyone.