I first met John Prescott, JP to his friends, in the autumn of 1997 for breakfast at the Caledonian Hotel on the west end of Edinburgh's Princes Street. At the time JP was both deputy prime minister and secretary of state for the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), and I was chair of transport on Edinburgh City Council. We were like two soldiers comparing battle stories and revealing war wounds of what it was like to be on the front line in the battle against unrelenting car growth.
He liked what we were doing in Edinburgh with Greenways bus priority, car clubs, car-free residential areas, pedestrianisation and pro-cycling measures. He wanted other local authorities to follow and asked me if I could get involved in spreading best practices.
He lamented that he often spoke to local authority officers but not to the politicians in charge of local transport and asked me if I could set up an event so he could engage with them. The UK Chairs of Transport annual conference was born, soon to morph into the National Transport Awards.
We expected criticism from the roads and motoring lobby for pursuing an agenda to change how we travel. What we didn't expect, and what made us most angry, was criticism from people and organisations that should have been on our side: NGOs and academics, who didn't think we were radical enough. We hit it off. Our dads worked in the railway – his as a signalman and mine as a train driver. Someone as powerful as the DPM can change people's lives; he certainly changed mine. I went from being a local politician to someone who was propelled onto the national stage as a member of the panel of advisors on the 1998 Transport White paper, a member of the British Rail Board – soon to become the Strategic Rail Authority – and then Chair of the Commission for Integrated Transport (CfIT). My home moved from Edinburgh to London, and I worked closely with JP for the next six years.
He was a complex character who was much more vulnerable and anxious than his aggressive, combative, confident public persona. He once got lost when he came to see me in Edinburgh's City Chambers and started to panic. I related to his inner inferiority complex and his continual battle to prove himself in a system where privilege and background too often drowned out meritocracy. I saw it as my role to encourage and protect him – sometimes from himself. He was the standard bearer for sustainable transport and my instinct was to form a Pretorian guard around him.
I remember in 1999 when he was being lambasted for being anti-car and for the M4 bus lane in particular that I read out to him the famous Theodore Roosevelt quote about striving valiantly and daring greatly: "It's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worth cause."
He immersed himself in transport policy ever since Neil Kinnock gave him the shadow transport brief in the late 1980s. He was enthusiastic about reducing our dependency on the car and getting freight off the road and onto rail. He wanted to learn from other countries: why did Germany have higher car ownership but lower car use? He wasn't anti-car ownership; he wanted more responsible car use.
What is his legacy, and what would he do if he were in charge of transport today?
The bible, as far as JP was concerned, was the 1998 White Paper on transport policy, A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone. Its focus was on reducing the need to travel through better planning policies and achieving modal shift away from the car. Not something you hear politicians talk about now. He knew that we needed to invest much more in public transport – and this came with the 10-year Transport Plan in 2000 – but also had to include car restraint. So, congestion charging, workplace parking levies, fuel duty escalators and reallocating road space way from cars were all part of the tool kit.
He was ridiculed for saying: "judge me in five years' time if there are not a lot more people using public transport and fewer people using cars". While car use continued to increase, car intensitym- the number of car journeys relative to economic activity declined for the first time. And he presided over an unprecedented growth in rail travel. London experienced the biggest modal shift from car to sustainable transport anywhere in the world. While Ken Livingstone deserves the credit for this in his role as mayor, it would not have been possible without JP, who was pivotal in creating the office of London mayor and in the legislation giving powers to mayors and local authorities to introduce congestion charging.
There was one meeting in 1999 with the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, which shaped transport for a decade. Gordon wanted JP to support the Public Private Partnership for London Underground. After the cost overruns and delays on the Jubilee line, the Treasury had lost confidence in the public sector to deliver. JP agreed to back him on condition that congestion charging revenue was hypothecated, something that was anathema to the Treasury. (He also got Gordon to agree not to break up the BAA monopoly and to grant borrowing powers to Manchester Airport). Mayor Livingstone would not have touched congestion charging with a barge pole if he could not have retained the money to invest in public transport. While the personal relationship between JP and Livingstone was suspicious and frosty, they shared a passion and common objective in revolutionising how we travel.
This was one of a number of meetings with the chancellor held in JP's office. It's very unusual for the chancellor to show such respect to a fellow cabinet member, but then JP was not just deputy prime minister but also a crucial power broker in the dynamics between Blair and Brown. We have never had someone so politically powerful in charge of transport, and I doubt we ever will.
What would he do with that power today? HS2 would not be curtailed to the point that it is becoming a laughing stock – he would ensure that we took it not just to Manchester but all the way to Scotland. He was a champion of regional development and redistributing the nation's wealth long before the term levelling up was thought of. He had form on delivering big rail projects. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link was late and over budget, but he did not hide and run for cover, he brought in Sir Alistair Morton and empowered him to deliver the project.
He was even more enthusiastic when it came to buses. Do you remember From Workhorse to Thoroughbred: a better Role for Bus Travel, a daughter document of the 1998 White Paper? It was published in late March 1999 and was all about making buses attractive for car users and getting the modal shift he craved. That meant buses had to be future proofed from rising traffic congestion with bus priority pivotal.
He would not have tolerated the 20% increase in bus journey times we have experienced since he left office. I worry that today we focus too much on various concessionary travel schemes and not enough on the thoroughbred part of the vision. Bus travel is dominated much more by the young, old, and financially challenged groups than was envisaged by JP. He shared the vision of Gustavo Petro, who is now president of Columbia but was then mayor of Bogota, that a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it is where the rich use public transport.
When JP asked me to chair the Commission for Integrated Transport he thought that the agenda he was pursuing was too radical for a Department for Transport which had thought that building more road was the answer to traffic congestion during the "predict and provide" era. He wanted CfIT not just to advise but to monitor performance. When he moved on from transport after the 2001 general election his successors did not share his vision nor passion for changing how we travel. CfIT had its monitoring powers removed and withered on the vine.
His fellow Hull MP, Alan Johnson, summed his legacy up when he said that while Blair and Brown were the Lennon and McCartney of the New Labour government JP was the George Harrison. George Harrison was the under rated member of the Beatles in the same way that JP was the under-rated member of the government he served it.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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