By the time you read this, Professor Glenn Lyons and I will have done our turn at this year’s Transport Practitioners’ Meeting (TPM) in Greenwich, picking up the work we did late last year with an informed group of fellow professors to identify and craft a set of questions we thought needed to be addressed by those taking decisions on roads spending.
I’m not going to go back over those questions here; go have a look at our Road Investment Scrutiny Panel report if you haven’t already done so.
Thinking about what might be most interesting to draw from this work for the TPM audience, we found ourselves reflecting on whether the task of taking those spending decisions could ever be a wholly or largely technocratic exercise.
I’ll spare the blushes of those I worked with in the past who appeared to think that the well-oiled machine that is the Department for Transport’s cost:benefit calculator could be wheeled out from the secure facility in the Malvern Hills where it is stored for safekeeping, be given a quick wipe with an oily rag, and be fed a bunch of carefully crafted numbers such that, after a modest period of digestion, it would produce an irrefutably correct answer.
I have previously had to explain that, even if such a thing was possible, there’s ‘correct’ as in maths and economics, and then there’s correct as in politics – the latter being a world where one quickly learns that being right and being persuasive are two very different things.
Of course, the reality is that any process of cost:benefit calculation is only going to be as ‘good’ as the numbers and assumptions on which it is based and on which it is fed. This takes us into two areas of challenging professional judgement: forecasting and (for want of a better shorthand) valuing.
Forecasting may be a science, but it’s hardly an exact science. Just tap ‘weather forecast’ into your search engine of choice and you’ll see what I mean. My firm view is that the only thing we can say with complete confidence about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet. Everything else is more or less educated conjecture. Just ask the poor souls who are wrestling with the latest cost estimates for remodelling Euston station to accommodate HS2.
And then there’s the valuing – how should we arrive at relative valuations for different things? We’ve been going at this for decades and if I could bank all the hours I’ve spent in debates just about the value of time I would probably have amassed enough to be retired by now.
Not only are we prone to ascribing different valuations to the same things, but also our views change over time.
In preparing for our performance, I happened across the lengthy set of objectives for the London Assessment Studies back in the late 1980s. Taken together, they struck me as a pretty comprehensive suite of ambitions. And, as Hansard records then roads minister Peter Bottomley explaining: ‘These objectives cannot be considered individually, they need to be considered together.’ Considered together, yes, but also individually ascribed values, even in ranges, that were contested then and would be as vigorously contested now.
So the task of taking those important road spending decisions – be they at programme or scheme level – rests on a hopefully defensible but necessarily subjective set of valuations, and the degree of confidence the decision maker has in a set of forecasts spanning everything from the near-term cost of a scheme through to the extent of net benefits accruing decades hence.
This is why we focused so much in our seven questions on the importance of the decision-making process being transparent so that the rationale and the robustness of the evidence base can be probed, interrogated and challenged.
We shouldn’t run away with the idea that even the best-informed and transparent of processes will generate an unequivocally ‘correct’ answer. As transport professionals, all we can do is our best to advocate for approaches that will look as good with hindsight as they do on the drawing board.
Steve Gooding is director of the RAC Foundation and writes a monthly column for Highways magazine.
