Smeed Report - Reactions

Reactions

The report was received with ambivalence by the Macmillan government, which had commissioned it: the Ministry reported in June 1964 that it would first need to study the implications and thus the government was "therefore in no way committed to this form of restraint". It initially withheld release of the full report to the public and took its time to consider it. It was rumoured that the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, had suggested to "take a vow that if we are re-elected we will never again set up a study like this one".

Events took over, and two elections were fought in 1964 and 1966 with transport as a major election issue, resulting in a new Wilson government with Barbara Castle as Minister of Transport. A large majority enabled her to bring into law a number of the then-controversial safety concepts that the RRL had been investigating, such as speed limits and breathalyzers. She appeared to become an advocate of road pricing per the Smeed Report and publicly criticised the construction of new urban motorways as "self-defeating", during a tour of US cities, slowing down the UK's future urban road building programme as a consequence.

However, the political will needed to establish such a scheme seemed to be slipping away, and commitment atrophied in the UK as the minister requested more feasibility reports, until, in 1970, the government changed and the scheme effectively died.

The Smeed committee members had already become frustrated and moved on. In 1966, Smeed was appointed Professor of Traffic Studies at University College London (UCL) and formed the then Research Group in Traffic Studies, which grew to become the present Centre for Transport Studies at UCL within the University of London Centre for Transport Studies. The chair of the parallel and quasi-competing committee, Professor Sir Colin Buchanan took up a post as professor of transport at Imperial College in 1963. Roth acrimoniously left the country to join the World Bank in 1967, citing the delays and the mutation of the pricing scheme from an enabling investment-raising mechanism into a method of restriction.

It remained influential elsewhere, with economist Maurice Allais following up this work in 1965 with a report for the EEC that recommended rail and road privatisation to allow the operation of free market forces across Europe's roads and railways, and with the Adam Smith Institute who encouraged Roth to revisit his earlier analysis in 1992, when he noted that "the idea of charging for the use of congested roads is still hypersensitive, and many politicians avoid the subject studiously."