Department

In 1970, reflecting emerging concerns
about the relationship between transport,
development and the environment the
Transport Ministry was amalgamated
with the Ministry of Housing and Local
Government to form a new Department of
the Environment with Peter Walker as its first
Secretary of State. The arrangement lasted just
six years but was revived under New Labour
in 1997 with John Prescott as Secretary of
State for a Department of Environment,
Transport and the Regions. This attempt at
integration via a mega-department proved
no longer-lasting being dismantled again in
2001/2 to form the present pattern of separate
departments for Transport, Environment and
Rural Affairs, and Communities and Local
Government.
Environmental campaigning proved to
be a particular source of frustration and
embarrassment to the Department. Tactics of
direct action came to be used first to disrupt
public inquiries into major road-building
schemes and later to hamper the construction
of the new roads themselves, most famously
in connection with the Newbury By-Pass
and the M3 extension at Twyford Down near
Winchester. The Conservative Government’s
White Paper ‘Roads for Prosperity’ published
in 1989, heralded as the ‘biggest roadbuilding
programme since the Romans’,
caused consternation even amongst its own
supporters being based on forecasts of a 142%
increase in national road traffic by 2025. (To
date the increase has been just 20%). Evidence
published by the Department’s own Advisory
Committee on Trunk Roads that new roads
‘induced’ additional traffic compounded the
backlash and enabled the incoming New
Labour Government to trumpet its transport
strategy as a ‘New Deal’ incorporating ‘an
end to predict and provide’.
Peter Walker was the first Secretary of State
at the Department of the Environment,
which for a time housed the transport brief
March 2013 | THE HOUSE MAGAZINE | 7