Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR ARCHIE
ROBERTSON OBE, HIGHWAYS
AGENCY
8 DECEMBER 2004
Q40 Mrs Browning: Mr Robertson, I do
listen to local radio and I am sure it is a useful tool in advising
motorists once they are on the road, but my experience is that
as I am driving over Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire the only local
radio I can get is Radio Berkshire, which is not covering Wiltshire,
and it is the most irritating thing because I have one of those
things—somebody will tell me what the technological term
is—where, as I am listening to a Mahler symphony on Classic
FM, local radio keeps interrupting. It is never relating to where
I happen to be driving at the time. I think your dependence on
this facility is really not satisfactory. I think you really should
give attention to what my colleagues have said to you about getting
timely and informative information on to those notices or on to
the radio through, presumably, notices you can give to radio to
make sure we get useful information and not things that really
do not apply.
Mr Robertson: I was reflecting
what people tell us they use as a means of collecting and getting
information when they are making their journeys. We get this information
as part of our customer surveys that we do twice a year. Of course,
the answer is everybody wants a bit of something so there is no
media that you can neglect, at the end of the day, and that includes
the variable message sign, which we are deploying as quickly as
our resources will allow.
Q41 Mrs Browning: On the point of resources,
can I draw your attention to paragraph 4.22 where it sets out
for us what I think I picked up in a remark you made earlier when
you said you look after your people. You certainly do, do you
not? I see here that since taking over responsibilities from the
police's traffic management, your budget has increased from £44
million to £73 million, and I see here a breakdown of how
you are spending that extra money. Tell me, Mr Robertson, how
come you have spent (is this really true? I am sure the Comptroller
and Auditor General can confirm this) £3 million on additional
uniforms for the 600 more traffic officers and control staff?
I did a quick, back-of-the-envelope job and I reckon that is £5,000
per head for uniforms. Now, I am somebody who knows about spending
money on clothes, Mr Robertson, but even in my wildest dreams
£5,000 per head for uniforms seems a tad excessive.
Mr Robertson: I agree with you
and certainly there is no such amount of money being spent on
uniforms alone, although there is stock and other safety equipment
which will be included in that. I would be happy to give you a
breakdown.[2]
Q42 Mrs Browning: I would be very pleased
to know who you commission this from, which designer company has
designed and produced these catwalk uniforms.
Mr Robertson: I am sorry to disappoint
you but they are not exotic, at least to my sartorial sense.
Q43 Mrs Browning: Let us just focus,
then, on this breakdown of this extra money on officers, on uniforms,
on training (clearly, that is allowable). What actually are you
going to deliver for this extra expenditure compared to what the
police have been delivering? What will we see on the ground?
Mr Robertson: First of all, there
will be 454, approximately, policemen who will be doing other
patrol duties in future (chasing criminals, I guess, at the end
of the day, is what they should be doing) and we will be taking
over their responsibilities. We will be manning seven regional
control centres which replace over 20 that the police have right
now, and managing the traffic using variable traffic signs, using
CCTV, using loops in the road, detecting incidents early and deploying
traffic officers. These regional control centres will also take
over from the police the responsibility for setting the local
signs, and they will provide information to the National Traffic
Control Centre which will put the information on the 50 Variable
Message Signs that we see round the country which are intended
to give you information about choices in your route. The traffic
officers themselves will be deployed to accident sites and with
whatever resolve they can they will get the accident cleared quickly;
if it is debris they will move it, if it is vehicles in carriageways
they will move them to the side, if it is vehicles on the hard
shoulder they will arrange for their recovery either from the
AA or by private contractor. They will also collect information
about what is causing accidents in the first place, and will log
that information back to enable us to know where accidents happen
and why and further inform the sorts of decisions we can make
to make traffic work better. They will also provide more information
about what causes accidents, and I optimistically hope that that
will enable us to reduce the number of accidents we have in the
first place, because that form of congestion, although it is not
the biggest form of congestion, is the worst because you never
know where and when it is going to happen.
Q44 Mrs Browning: Could I venture to
suggest an area you might like to start looking, because it seems
very obvious to me? For about the last 40 years I have driven,
I suppose, something like 25,000 miles a year, so I am somebody
who has used the motorways a lot. It seems to me that one of the
biggest problems on our motorways, apart from the point that has
been raised about lorries (and I do agree with colleagues about
the standard of lorry driving, which is quite different now to
what it was a few years ago), vehicles travelling too close to
the car in front at a speed where they clearly cannot brake, resulting
in all those multiple shunts that you get. Are you going to have
the powers to do something about that, or make specific recommendations?
You see it all the time.
Mr Robertson: What we will do
is we will collect the information and put it together in a way
that it has not been put together before, because the police gather
information for follow-up on criminal proceedings. So we will
be able to identify whether there are patterns like that which
are causing problems, and we will pass that information to the
people who should rightly do something about this—who, in
this case, would be the department in conjunction with the Home
Office, because it is an enforcement issue.
Q45 Mrs Browning: Can I ask you—and
you have touched on it quite a bit today—about when there
is an accident on the motorway? When that happens, automatically
now the police close between those junctions as they now regard
it as a potential scene of crime—something they never used
to do. In your judgement, is that really the right way forward
or should it be a matter of judgement at the time for the most
senior police officer present to decide whether that is applicable?
Do you feel there should be some more flexibility in this? I hear
what you say about clearing vehicles and, obviously, getting emergency
vehicles to the scene has got to be the priority here, but it
seems to me that we could perhaps have some traffic being properly
directed by your new staff in their lovely, new uniforms around
the scene of the accident while the police deal with the part
of the accident they have got to deal with. Have we not become
too rigid in this? Is it not time for a re-think about whether
that is appropriate on every occasion?
Mr Robertson: The police are currently
reconsidering a document that I believe is called the Police Incidents
Investigation Manual, which I have not personally seen but which
sets out the ACPO guidelines for investigating such incidents.
They have told us about it and they want to talk to us about how
it shapes up in the future. So I consider that to be an opportunity
to ensure that we are getting the best for not only the people
who are affected directly by the accident but those of us who
are held up.
Q46 Mrs Browning: What is your view on
that?
Mr Robertson: It is difficult
to characterise an accident. My view is that there needs to be
trust and confidence between traffic officers and police officers
such that we can get on with keeping traffic moving on the bits
of the carriageway they do not need to designate as part of the
current rescue area or a scene of crime. I do feel there is potential
for that. I equally think there is a huge amount of potential
for investigation time to be reduced. In this country I understand
that, currently, that averages about five-and-a-half hours. I
have just returned from the United States and Canada where they
achieve significantly shorter times than that because they have
a different attitude to incidents but, also, because they use
technology differently. I intend to work with the police to get
them to introduce that technology, or buy it out of some of my
uniform funds, to return to sites and measure things electronically
for them and save a lot of their time.
Mrs Browning: Thank you very much. If
I could just say I think you have got plenty of scope there within
that budget to spend some money on the sharp end. I can certainly
see some savings there that you might draw upon. Thank you.
Q47 Jon Trickett: I wonder if it is true
to say that we have got X millions of pounds to spend on the highways,
that when it comes to congestion, schemes compete for that money,
they are prioritised according to the business case and that,
generally speaking, this report seems to say that the business
case almost invariably in the past has proved in favour of additional
road capacity rather than traffic management schemes, and that
is the reason why we get more and more road building and we have
not done anything like the traffic management that has gone on
abroad. Is that broadly the case?
Mr Robertson: There is one other
area of investment called the Small Schemes (or referred to in
the document as Local Network Management Schemes) which are small
schemes of value, up to about £5 million. These, basically,
entail things like realigning junctions or realigning slip roads,
and so forth; small bits of money just to make traffic flow better.
These, in terms of benefit cost ratio, are easily the best show
in town.
Q48 Jon Trickett: Thinking about the
bigger, strategic decisions which have to be taken, can you give
us an indication, because if I talk about the management of traffic
flow, the kind of software-type things, and hardware in terms
of using more tarmac, what is the ratio between one and the other
in general terms? Are you able to give us some feeling of the
relative costs?
Mr Robertson: A good small, £5
million scheme will give you three times the benefit cost ratio
of a major road scheme. There are simply limited opportunities
to do small schemes—
Q49 Jon Trickett: I am asking you about
traffic management, the management of flows, such as information
which is accurate and immediate to drivers as opposed to new tarmac.
I am talking about the balance of cost between the two, since
it seems to me that your business case, the way that it is structured,
is invariably pointing towards new roads rather than towards management
of flow. I am not talking about these smaller schemes now.
Mr Robertson: You need to do all
of them. This is an environment where demand for road use is going
up 17%.
Q50 Jon Trickett: This paper is saying
that each time you look at the business case almost invariably,
in terms of the management of traffic flows, the business case
fails, which presumably means that the money is then being spent
on additional roads, is it not?
Mr Robertson: The business case
is not failing, the business case is not showing us that we would
use a particular tool as much as our colleagues overseas have
done.
Q51 Jon Trickett: I am trying to get
you to tell me if you have got some indicative costs of the ratio
in terms of cost benefits between the management of flows, on
the one hand, and the building of roads, on the other, in alleviating
congestion. That seems to be the direction which the Agency has
taken historically. I am thinking you do not have that figure.
Mr Robertson: Every scheme is
essentially evaluated in the same way in terms of the cost of
the scheme and the benefits it will bring in terms of flow. That
applies equally to an information investment, like a sign or the
National Traffic Control Centre, as it does to a small scheme
to realign some junction, as it does to widening the M1.
Q52 Jon Trickett: I wonder if you could
reflect on my questions and, perhaps, do us a note, because I
want to pursue some other matters. Let me ask you about this issue,
which a number of Members have raised, which is to do with two
commercial vehicles running in the inside and middle lane and,
thereby, causing congestion, which frequently happens, in my experience,
particularly whenever there is a slight uphill incline and they
try to get past each other. How would a business case be constructed
to justify the action that says you cannot overtake in certain
parts, for example, which you say you are going to try on the
M40 or M42? Have you done a business case in that particular scenario?
Mr Robertson: There will be one,
but I have not seen it. However, it would be done on the basis
of increases in average speeds or reduction in time spent below
30 miles an hour, which is when you are congested and you then
begin to suffer—[3]
Q53 Jon Trickett: Presumably, the freight
would possibly move more slowly than it was hitherto doing, since
some vehicles were trying to overtake others.
Mr Robertson: That would also
be factored in but it remains to be seen, which is why we are
consulting and putting the business case together on just how
much impact that has. Again, this is something that other countries
are also trialling.
Q54 Jon Trickett: You have clearly said
that the way in which the British—presumably the Treasury
or somebody—ask you to do business case scenarios mitigates
against the adoption of such traffic flow management systems.
Mr Robertson: What I mean to say
is that in some cases, because of the different attitude that
different governments or different services take to this, different
tools have different levels of attractiveness. That has certainly
been our experience with ramp metering. I am not saying it is
going to be the same answer with constraining trucks to the left-hand
lane.
Q55 Jon Trickett: I personally—and
I think the Chairman agrees—would like to know more about
this business case, how it is constructed and so on, since it
seems to be one of the critical factors in making decisions in
declining to do the kind of things which are happening elsewhere.
That is what you said and that clearly is in the report. If the
Chairman agrees, could we have a note to explain how the system
works and how it might be constructed differently?
Mr Robertson: Can I just draw
one other painfully obvious point to this, which is that I always
have more good business cases than I have resources.[4]
Q56 Jon Trickett: If you have business
cases for £200 million, and you only have £100 million
to spend, you are spending £100 million on building new roads
rather than managing the flow of traffic on the existing roads,
and that seems to be the problem. It seems to be an entirely financially
driven set of decisions resulting from the way in which the business
case scenarios are being constructed. It seems to me that if you
are being given different ways of calculating the business case
with different outcomes, it is entirely feasible to suggest different
outcomes would come, and some of the irritants that we all see
when we are driving would be removed. I want to move on. I drive
quite a lot in France, and one of the interesting things in Paris
is how you can influence driving behaviour if you give people
sufficient information, which is immediate. On the Périphérique
and in all the Parisian motorway network, it will actually tell
you how long it will take to go from one junction to the next,
"huit minutes, situation fluide" or whatever.
Why are we not able to get that kind of information? Has a business
case been done on that? That would clearly influence driver decisions
and probably help quite a lot in resolving congestion, would it
not?
Mr Robertson: It may do where
we can give people choices, and there are some places where we
can do that—not perhaps as many as there are in France,
but they are there, and ultimately we can already give people
advice on which way to go round the M25 if they are coming down
the M6. There is still a lot more work to be done on it.
Q57 Jon Trickett: You were saying to
Mr Curry earlier that the technology is not there in terms of
coming into the cab. Clearly, it has been present in Paris for
many, many years. Most Members will have driven there over the
years, and the information comes down to how long it takes to
get from one junction to another and possible alternative scenarios.
So the technology is there, is it not?
Mr Robertson: The technology is
there. The predictive technology is there. It is used on our website
already. As and when we can roll out the signs . . .
Q58 Jon Trickett: Has the business case
not demonstrated that it will justify itself?
Mr Robertson: No, the business
case is justified.
Q59 Jon Trickett: So when are you going
to do it then?
Mr Robertson: I expect to do it
in the Spending Review period, given that for this making better
use type of activity, which encompasses traffic officers, technology
and the small schemes I was talking about, that there will be,
I expect, something like £1.3 billion over a three-year period.
Chairman: As you approach Paris, it tells
you "Périphérique est" or "ouest
fluide" so you know it is moving.
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