House of Commons Transport Committee The Departmental Annual Report 2004 Fourth Report of Session 2004–05 Report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence Ordered by The House of Commons to be printed 2 March 2005 HC 409 Incorporating HC 1280-i, Session 2003-04 Published on 10 March 2005 by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited £14.50 The Transport Committee The Transport Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Department for Transport and its associated public bodies. Current membership Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody MP (Labour, Crewe) (Chairman) Mr Jeffrey M Donaldson MP (Democratic Unionist, Lagan Valley) Mr Brian H. Donohoe MP (Labour, Cunninghame South) Clive Efford MP (Labour, Eltham) Mrs Louise Ellman MP (Labour/Co-operative, Liverpool Riverside) Ian Lucas MP (Labour, Wrexham) Miss Anne McIntosh MP (Conservative, Vale of York) Mr Paul Marsden MP (Liberal Democrat, Shrewsbury and Atcham) Mr John Randall MP (Conservative, Uxbridge) Mr George Stevenson MP (Labour, Stoke-on-Trent South) Mr Graham Stringer MP (Labour, Manchester Blackley) Powers The Committee is one of the departmental select committees, the powers of which are set out in House of Commons Standing Orders, principally in SO No 152. These are available on the Internet via www.parliament.uk. Publications The Reports and evidence of the Committee are published by The Stationery Office by Order of the House. All publications of the Committee (including press notices) are on the Internet at www.parliament.uk/transcom. A list of Reports of the Committee in the present Parliament is at the back of this volume. Committee staff The current staff of the Committee are Eve Samson (Clerk), David Bates (Second Clerk), Clare Maltby (Committee Specialist), Philippa Carling (Inquiry Manager), Miss Frances Allingham (Committee Assistant), Miss Michelle Edney (Secretary), Henry Ayi-Hyde (Senior Office Clerk) and James O’Sullivan (Sandwich Student). All correspondence should be addressed to the Clerk of the Transport Committee, House of Commons, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA. The telephone number for general enquiries is 020 7219 6263; the Committee’s email address is [email protected] 1 Contents Report Page 1 Introduction 5 2 The Departmental Report 6 3 The Department’s targets 10 Developments since publication of the Annual Report 10 Congestion 13 Targets for Rail Use 14 Local transport related targets 15 Bus quality contracts 15 Environmental targets 16 Underperformance 16 4 Efficiency savings 18 5 Agencies 20 6 The Future of Transport 22 Private sector investment 23 7 Conclusion 24 Conclusions and recommendations 24 Annex 27 Introduction 27 Preparations for severe weather 27 Impact of the severe weather 28 Conditions at Heathrow on 28/29 January 28 Service cancellations 28 Failings identified 29 De-icing policy 29 Provision for passengers 30 Formal minutes 31 Witnesses 33 List of written evidence 33 Reports from the Transport Committee since 2002 34 3 Summary Each year, the Departmental Annual Report gives the Department for Transport an opportunity to set out what it is doing, why it is doing it, and how successful its policies have been. Used properly, it could set out a comprehensive and coherent picture of the Department’s policy and performance. The Department for Transport has failed to seize this opportunity. We believe that both the 2003 and 2004 Annual Reports have been inadequate. The next Annual Report must be more coherent. It should contain far clearer information about the Department’s major programmes, better, more comprehensible, information about the Department’s performance and a better account of the way in which the Department works with others to achieve its goals. The Department for Transport Annual Report should not be about the activities of the Department in isolation; it needs to include accounts of the work done by other departments, local authorities and the private sector. The need for a clear, comprehensive, Annual Report is increased by the new White Paper on The Future of Transport. Only time will tell whether the ambitions of the 10 Year Plan for Transport have been abandoned, or whether the White Paper’s emphasis on sustained investment, improvements in transport management and planning ahead will instead ensure they are fulfilled. We need clear, comprehensive information which will allow us to judge the Department’s progress. The Department’s Annual Report must become the key document setting out the Department’s strategy and performance for both Parliament and the public. Otherwise there is a danger that official energy will go into producing a plethora of substandard documents, rather than a single, authoritative one. 5 1 Introduction 1. Each year, Government Departments produce an Annual Report on their activities. It is part of a series of documents regularly presented to Parliament. Annually, the Department for Transport requests expenditure through the Supply Estimates, and Supplementary Estimates, and reports financial performance in its resource accounts. In addition, it now produces an Autumn Performance Report, presenting an interim report of progress against its targets. 1 2. We make a practice of taking evidence from the Secretary of State and the Permanent Secretary on the Department for Transport Annual Report, and its associated documents. Since December 2003, the Department has also produced three significant white papers; The Future of Air Transport, The Future of Rail, and The Future of Transport.2 The Secretary of State told us that these three White Papers were “designed to set out the framework for transport in this country over the next 30 years.”3 We took the opportunity offered by the evidence session on the Departmental Annual Report to discuss this framework with the Secretary of State, and include some observations on The Future of Transport in this Report. We very much value the wide ranging discussion we have in the evidence session on the Annual Report and we are grateful to our witnesses. We would also like to express our thanks to our specialist adviser, Dr Greg Marsden. 1 Department for Transport Autumn Performance Report 2004, Cm 6403 2 The Future Of Transport: a network for 2030, Cm 6234, July 2004. The Committee under took enquiries into Aviation(Sixth Report of Session 2002-03, HC 454-I) and The Future of the Railway (Seventh Report of Session 2003- 04, HC145-I) before each of the relevant White Papers appeared. 3 Q 3 6 2 The Departmental Report 3. The Annual Report is an opportunity for the Department to give an overview of its performance, and that of its agencies. It should be part of a series of documents clearly setting out the Department’s aims, the way in which it intends to achieve these aims, how resources are being spent, what targets exist to measure its performance and whether or not those targets will be reached. Unfortunately, the Department’s Report fails to do this. The associated Autumn Performance Report also needs to be improved. 4. In summary, it is difficult to see the links between the Department’s strategic objectives and progress reports against the Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets agreed with the Treasury. The format is ill-considered: for example, the Autumn Performance Report does not explain the links between the PSA targets and the Department’s wider objectives, which are not even included. The spending review and annual report contain no details about the way in which expenditure is related to the Department’s objectives, or has been re–allocated to ensure that particular targets are reached. Finally, there is little information about the department’s performance management and monitoring framework, which is particularly important since the Department for Transport relies on many external agents, including some in the private sector, to achieve its goals. The Department’s own guidance on Local Transport Plans identifies key priorities shared between central and local government – congestion; accessibility; safer roads, air quality and quality of life.4 We believe that future reports should reflect these priorities. We recommend that the Department for Transport reflects on the various documents in which it reports progress. We believe the Department needs to make sure that they give a clear view of the Department’s aims and its success in fulfilling them, and that they form a coherent series. 5. The Annual Report itself lacks coherence. It is divided into eight chapters; the first two look at the year in brief and at the responsibilities and organisation of the Department. Each of the subsequent chapters looks at a particular topic: the strategic networks; railways; local transport; aviation and shipping; safety and security; and sustainable transport. The fact that analysis is divided between transport modes (“the strategic route network”, “railways”) and more thematic chapters (“sustainable transport”, “safety and security”) means that programmes can be double counted. These chapters are followed by appendices setting out public expenditure changes, recruitment in public appointment tables, departmental strategies and other detailed information, much, like the Public Expenditure Tables, prescribed by the Treasury. We recommend that the Department considers a radical restructuring of its report so that chapters are more clearly related to the Department’s strategy and its Public Service Agreement targets. 6. The Report fails to give clear information about the Department’s programmes. The narrative chapters (Chapters 2-8) vary in quality and in the amount and type of information they give. In fact, the Annual Report may include descriptions of every single one of the Department’s programmes, but because there is no coherent structure the reader cannot be confident that is the case. A common failing is that the individual chapters do 4 Full Guidance on Local Transport Plans, Department for Transport, December 2004, p 22 7 not allow the reader easily to grasp what has been done by central government, and what by local authorities or other bodies, or how responsibilities are divided.