Lesley Riddoch: Fund the congestion habit or fund the real cure

Published on Sunday 14 December 2008 21:37

ARE the media hindering the case for tackling climate change? Or are politicians with low levels of emotional intelligence doing that quite nicely all by themselves?

Manchester's congestion-charging failure, after Edinburgh's referendum debacle, has kicked road-pricing into political oblivion, and Gordon Brown now stands accused of congestion charging by stealth with plans to charge for private car-parking spaces.

All of this begs the question – if politicians have been determined to cut car use all along, why did they bother submitting their congestion-charging schemes to the public for approval? Did they really expect Yes votes? Did politicians fail to understand the degree of public dependency on cars, even from the back-seats of their ministerial Mondeos?

Asking drivers to approve a rise in the cost of the driving habit is worse than asking turkeys to vote for Christmas – it's like asking alcoholics to vote for sobriety. It may be wise, but those who believe their lives are possible only through limitless supplies of any commodity – be it alcohol, time, heroin or roadspace – will not vote to kick the habit. So why ask? Let's jettison all the tosh about mandates, transparency and building public support for change – that's what governments should be doing every day.

The plain truth is that policy-makers in Manchester have wasted 20 million asking drivers to approve more restricted, expensive driving. The only explanation for such stupidity is a calamitous loss of nerve, combined with a nave belief in the power of "education" alone to effect change and a wilful ignorance of human behaviour.

Ken Livingstone, by contrast, outlined his plans in a manifesto and then changed London without further "consultation". True, he was finally kicked out and his charging zones are under pressure – but mostly because he tried to add Kensington commuters to the charging zone, instead of making sure the original area was working properly.

Everyone who tried to get public approval for congestion charging has subsequently been chucked out of office. With a whopping 80 per cent No vote, Manchester council leaders will probably be next. And yet we all know the love affair with the car must end.

So why will the public not vote for congestion charging? Are voters greedy and stupid, or over-influenced by a climate-change-denying media? Perhaps congestion-charging schemes themselves have been weak? Edinburgh's proposal was so complicated even advocates found it hard to explain. The Scottish Government had already OK'd the cost of trams, so the congestion charge income hardly seemed pivotal.

But there's another factor. "Green" voices advocating change have alienated the general public through a deadly combination of hectoring tone, wagging finger, reproachful air and over-reliance on "facts" to change behaviour. Like all pioneers, Greens are often obsessives – the first to act differently because they don't register the constraining influences and socialising pressures that affect everyone else.

The British public has an enduring mistrust of dour, isolated extremists – an outlook reflected and shaped by the popular media. So the more scepticism green campaigners encounter, the more facts they earnestly and urgently supply, and the more the public quietly ignores them.

Public policy isn't based solely on evidence. It's based on what's possible. Road-charging is possible in Norway because it helped to finance tunnels to connect offshore islands to the mainland. The deal was proposed in manifestos, discussed at elections, agreed by local parties and accepted by the public. A consensual approach to problem-solving gave Nordic nations the developed world's highest trust rating between citizen and government – the lack of it gave Britain the lowest.

Governments reap as they sow. The careless cruelty of Margaret Thatcher followed by the stealth of New Labour have weakened belief in the trustworthiness of government. Without trust, our society has bred cynicism about the power of collective action to shape change.

Visionary leadership is needed to trigger conditions for change – like that provided 15 years ago by Edinburgh transport convener David Begg, who bought land for park-and-rides and introduced Greenways without a referendum and in the teeth of real scepticism. Park-and-rides are now full and the principle of bus preference widely accepted.

Such leadership is needed again to ease an unwilling public out of unsustainable, credit-crunch-related habits. Like living in one place and working in another, driving when we could take public transport, driving the kids to school when they can obviously walk. People know change must come. And yet our ingrained habits – habits that have created our dysfunctional society – feel familiar, comfortable and socially "normal".

Thus, perfectly intelligent people want car journeys to be faster, roads to be wider, other people to stay at home, and change to come only when they have the time to consider it. In our (traffic) jammed-up lives, that time never comes.

There's a stark choice now: fund the habit or fund the cure. Trying to hand that decision to voters, the UK government has come completely unstuck. Manchester was offered a 3 billion sweetener if it said Yes to congestion charging.

Now the money is withdrawn and Gordon Brown has managed to appear like a bribing parent, backing himself into a congestion-charging cul-de-sac. The government needs a city trial before a national scheme can be introduced. But it needs a Yes vote before any city trial.

The only way out is more stealth – the new workplace parking levy scheme to let English councils charge up to 350 per annum for employers' parking spaces. Commuters will be priced off the streets anyway – and for many Greens, the ends will justify the means. But such stealth will only reinforce public mistrust of government – and in the long run, isn't that a bigger loss than any congestion-charging vote?