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Tag: Issue of the Week 3

  • John Beavan – 1966 Comments on Barbara Castle, the White Paper and Beeching (Baron Ardwick)

    John Beavan – 1966 Comments on Barbara Castle, the White Paper and Beeching (Baron Ardwick)

    The comments made by John Beavan for the Daily Mirror on 28 July 1966.

    At last we are moving forward from Beeching. At last, after years of fumbling and dissension, Labour has got itself a comprehensive policy for transport – for passenger services and for freight on road, rail and even the dear old inland waterways.

    I congratulate the Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle, on her need in reaching decisions, and hope she will succeed in translating much of her policy into action. Sensible, the controversial White paper she publishes today gives Lord Beeching his due. If it had not been for him, I do not believe that Mrs Castle or any other minister would have been able to sort things out. Beeching had a narrow brief – to make the shabby, flabby Victorian monster that was British Railways wealthy enough to earn its keep.

    The chief remedy he advocated was deep surgery. Many cuts have been made, many remain to be made, because even the Tories could see the social consequences of some of his suggested cuts were unacceptable to too many people. The brief to Beeching had been too simple. Some of us hoped that Beeching would be put in charge of Britain’s rail and road transport with a proper brief. But he wanted to go back to ICI. In principle, Barbara Castle’s solution is the right one. We should sort out the profitable and potentially profitable lines and tell the Railways Board that it’s their job to make them pay.

    What about the other sections? Some are hopeless. Mrs Castle admits there are 1,330 miles of freight track that are not needed and 400 miles of passenger line which are not needed nor seriously wanted. They should be cut out but we are left with a third class – lines that are useful and socially important but are unprofitable. These, Mrs Castle proposes, should be openly subsidised. It is a good principle – if sophisticated accountancy really can sort out the sheep from the goats. The sum needed to subsidise the necessary but unprofitable services would be a big one.

    Although the Government had decided on social grounds to keep a fair-sized railway system, the cost of doing so should make them ask about each subsidised section, one highly important question:

    ‘Can the social needs be met more cheaply and as efficiently by some other form of transport?’

    There is a lot more to the White Paper than this. I welcome particularly the policy for a combined service for road and rail in the big urban areas. If I could send a personal message to the Labour Party it would be this: In this year of 1966 more suffering is caused to British workers by public transport than by private capitalism.

  • Barbara Castle – 1966 Confirmation on Not Reappointing Lord Beeching

    Barbara Castle – 1966 Confirmation on Not Reappointing Lord Beeching

    The comments made by Barbara Castle, the then Transport Minister, in the House of Commons on 2 February 1966.

    Mr. Box asked the Minister of Transport whether she will approach Lord Beeching with a view to his reappointment as Chairman of British Railways.

    Mrs. Castle No.

  • Barbara Castle – 1984 Comments on the State of the Rail Network in the 1960s

    Barbara Castle – 1984 Comments on the State of the Rail Network in the 1960s

    The comments made by Barbara Castle in her 1984 book “The Castle Diaries 1964 -1970” as a background to the diary entries themselves.

    Nor had the railways been denationalised, merely decentralised. The 1962 Act had wiped out some of British Rail’s debt and then instructed it to pay its way. The Beeching Report, published in 1963, showed that this was to be done by drastic pruning of the network with over 2,000 stations and a third of the route mileage being eliminated. This had caused an outcry not only in the Labour Party, but among local communities.

    Labour spokesmen had bitterly opposed the 1962 Act as leaving transport without any unifying authority of any kind and I therefore faced demands from the Party and the unions for the re-establishment of the BTC, for the re-nationalisation of road haulage and for the reversal of the Beeching closure policy. While strongly believing in integration I felt we had to take account of transport developments since the 1947 Act. In the first place there was little evidence that the BTC umbrella structure has succeeded in integrating road and rail movements. Secondly, the nationalisation of road haulage had meant acquiring hundreds of small firms with inferior vehicles at excessive cost. It seemed better to encourage THC to continues its steady expansion of BRS by buying worthwhile firms and vehicles. Thirdly an explosion in the use of road transport – particularly the private car – had taken place. In 1947 there were only 3.5 million vehicles on the road, including nearly 2 million private cars, so the railways played the predominant role in the transport of passengers and goods. By 1964 the number of road vehicles had risen to over 12.5 million, including 8 million private cars, and the Road Research Laboratory was forecasting an increase to over 18 million cars by 1975. There had been a dramatic switch in transport of all kinds from rail to road, including a big expansion of C licences held by traders carrying their own goods. Recognising that it was no use nationalising road transport if own-account operators were to be left uncontrolled, the Labour Government in 1946 had at first announced that no C Licence holder was to be allowed to operate beyond  a radius of forty miles without special authority, but in the face of an outcry by industry it had lost its nerve and agreed to free own-account operators from any restrictive licensing.

    In such a situation it was no use trying to turn back the clock. I refused to be a King Canute, trying to force people onto railways which could not take them where they wanted to go. If the private car had brought the boon of mobility to millions of people, which it clearly had, then that boon should be available to everyone. We then must collectively faced the consequences and deal with them through new arrangements which reflected the new facts.

    In the first place we had to decide what size railway system we wanted in the new situation, how to subsidise it and how to get more traffic from road to rail. One obvious way was through the liner train concept which Dr Beeching had launched: the need to get away from small, slow waggon-load consignments of freight to a modern door-to-door through service by fast trains carrying containers, in which sundries traffic had been loaded at special depots for easy transfer from lorry to rail. But this hopeful development had been bedevilled by the question of ‘open terminals’. The BRB and the Government, anxious to get the highest return on their investment in the new container terminals, wanted them open to all-comers. The National Union of Railwaymen, fearful of redundancies for its members, wanted access limited to BRS and BR cartage vehicles. So the adoption of the new method had been stymied and this was one of the problems I had to solve.