They helped build a new approach to local transport. Who will take the baton now?

THE HEAVENLY HALL OF FAME for the heroes of transport planning has just admitted three of its most illustrious members. The loss of these important contributors in the field has also reminded us of some key steps in the emergence of this distinct area of professional endeavour. We are referring to David Bayliss, John Prescott and Dave Wetzel, whose obituaries appear in this issue.

Their passing - a pioneer practitioner, and two determined politicians- prompts timely reflection on how the distinct discipline of transport planning emerged, and where it stands now.

David Bayliss did probably more than anyone in helping define who transport planners are and what they do. His activity pre-dated any thoughts of them having a particular professional home and identity — though he was instrumental in helping found the Transport Planning Society to do just that.

Bayliss’s career was based upon gaining some very special experience at the sharp end of dealing with the consequences of a growing and more complex set of transport activities, particularly in urban areas. This included being with the Greater London Council in the 1970s at a really exciting, but challenging, time for transport. Arriving as a young talent he became accepted as the face of a new generation of transport professionals, becoming Chief Transport Planner of the GLC in 1972 and, from 1984 to 1999, Director of Planning for London Transport. This meant he was at the centre of transport policy- making and research in London for nearly 30 years as the city and its transport changed remarkably - ‘a rare privilege’, as he once put it.

Until he and some other contemporaries forged a distinct Transport Planner’s identity, the responsibilities for what became transport planning were generally in the hands of civil and highway engineers and town planners, plus some mysteriously-labelled people called County Surveyors.

It is not that others did not see the need for a new take on achieving structured and integrated urban spatial development, including transport, rather than just building road and rail systems and running services. But the institutional landscape was just not appropriate for it. As explored by John Dales in his column in this issue, an early pioneer in this area was Dame Evelyn Sharp, who broke new ground for senior leadership in the civil service in the first half of the last century, spending almost her whole career in departments dealing with housing and local government. This field became a particularly important one post-1945, as the government began to consider how to repair war damage and reform urban housing. Sharp was at the forefront of this effort, and was instrumental in the framing of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. She was a champion of the construction of new towns such as Stevenage, Harlow and Milton Keynes. It was to Sharp that another transport pioneer, the legendary reforming Transport Secretary Barbara Castle, turned to support her 1968 Transport Act, that reorganised transport in the metropolitan areas outside London, by fostering a new generation of professionals in urban transport.

Sharp was the author of the 1970 report to the Minister of Transport called Transport Planning: The Men For The Job. Its intention was to make transport planning in local government more effective and forward-looking. The Sharp report discussed how to organise transport planning and what university courses would be needed to supply sufficient suitably trained people to perform the work. The report clearly stated that transport planning and land-use planning could not be separated, and should be performed by a single department as an ongoing activity, unlocking the first major land-use transportation studies in the UK. This was also the trigger for those like David Bayliss to emerge as the custodians of the new discipline.

In fact, transport planning had hitherto not been seen as something distinct and important in its own right, with responsibility for roads and bridges, railways, buses, and other modes left to individual industrial sectors, with little thought to how they all related to one another, or to wider matters such as land use, economic development, access to jobs, and environmental impact. An increasing range of other matters were also progressively recognised as all joined up in their implications. But it actually took several more decades for the old approaches to be at least notionally replaced.

To recognise that new paradigm in policy terms took more than the work of professionals — needing the leadership of politicians who saw the connections too.

This is where John Prescott played a key role. He wasn’t a transport planner, but he knew what the subject was, and was ready to draw on the skills and insights of professionals in the field in shaping and delivering an integrated transport policy. His work as Deputy Prime Minister at the then Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR),when the Labour Government came to power in 1997, was arguably the first time that a genuinely joined up approach was taken to transport planning at a national level. Some transport ministers before him are remembered for their innovative and visionary approaches to different dimensions of transport, but not for the holistic and multi-disciplinary framework that Prescott wanted in place.

Prescott’s work as Deputy Prime Minister at the then Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR),when the Labour Government came to power in 1997, was arguably the first time that a genuinely joined up approach was taken to transport planning at a national level.

The challenge he took on was almost impossible within governments that had departmental fiefdoms, and amid resentment of his huge multi-dimensional ’Super Ministry’. Deploying his larger than life and forceful personality, he won some battles, but arguably lost the war when the DETR was broken up.

David Bayliss was working to the same agenda, but had the extra weight of being at the nation’s largest local transport body — that in London, where both the challenges, responsibilities and the resources were sufficient to support him and his team in pioneering genuine multi-modal transport thinking. He had political support of his own for change too, through the charismatic and determined Ken Livingstone, first as GLC Leader and then London Mayor. As part of that came Livingstone’s side man on transport, Dave Wetzel, both a thinker and a fixer, in pushing forward new approaches to integrated transport planning and provision. For example, one of his personal missions was to link land use and transport,and implement land value capture to fund transport improvements.

The development of transport planning as a professional endeavour took another step when thoughts of establishing ‘a home’ for those engaged in the field occurred to a few of us. It was David Bayliss to whom we immediately turned for his endorsement and diplomatic support. He didn’t need much persuading that this was a good idea, agreeing that no single existing body did,or could, represent alone what now comprised the full profession of transport planning. I remember discussing with him that as there was no institution suitable to join if you saw the diverse world of transport planning as he and I did, there were still two choices. His solution had been to have joined up to at least four of them, eventually gaining Fellowships of the ICE, RTPI and CIHT, and CILT, adding for good measure membership of the international Institute of Transportation Engineers as a fifth. I told him my approach had been to not join any of them.

In the end, the Transport Planning Society was born of an agreement that all four of the existing institutions active in the field would - with varying degrees of enthusiasm - sponsor the new society, with David Bayliss instrumental in persuading them of the merit of that. He believed one key benefit of TPS was to embrace those arriving from a range of disciplines and first degrees, and by specifying a qualification that could help define them as a professional transport planner. This would cover all the essential components of contemporary transport planning, building on and adding to the formative knowledge and good practice that had been developed by those like him over the previous four decades. Senior professionals should meanwhile convincingly argue for widespread recognition of their subject area, he believed.

Interestingly, we are now at a another significant point on the journey on which Bayliss, Prescott and Wetzel were once leading the way. The new Government seems intuitively to recognise the need to grasp the same nettle they did, in addressing the nation’s current challenges through comprehensively linking transport, land use and development — especially to embrace the housing and environmental issues that they are anxious to prioritise. But they don’t yet quite seem to either be able to vocalise (or run with) the necessary delivery model, or create the head of steam within the machinery of government that Prescott managed, at least for a while. It is a key task.

Many in the media have sought to cast the current Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, as a modern-day equivalent of Prescott, with her working class background and no-nonsense manner. But, both her personal pedigree in transport matters, and political weight inside the Government set up, seem somewhat less than he had. She is now, meanwhile, being tested on the difficult issues relating to planning policy changes in her Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. This means facing down vested interests, and expressing a clear vision of what she believes is the right new framework for sustainable, liveable and accessible development. The mood music may be encouraging, but it is the delivery that will count.

Like Prescott, who brought on board a panel of advisors, and drew on the best available thinking and visioning to shape his programme of action, Rayner and her colleague in the Transport Department, Louise Haigh, might be well-advised to refine a double-act, plus support, to drive things forward across their two departments in the way their predecessor did. It is a measure of John Prescott’s political weight and force of character that he fronted that massive task single-handedly.

It was a huge ask for him - and would be for them. Major change, across existing boundaries of responsibility, is a real challenge. Bayliss, Prescott and Wetzel (with Livingstone) made significant and admirable progress on that mission in their own individual ways. Now it is time for the next generation to step up to the mark and push things further forward. It will take a serious level of energy to get real change over the line.

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT904, 28 November 2024.