John Humphrys – How Smart Is Government?

It’s not often that a cabinet minister admits that government is stupid. But it’s just happened. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, told the transport select committee that ‘smart motorways’, a policy he inherited, were ‘anything but’ smart. Their safety record – or, rather their lack-of-safety record – meant he could hardly have said anything else. The point, though, is that plenty of people told the smart guys who came up with the idea that it was daft in the first place. Indeed anyone could have told them because all it took was a little common sense to realise it. Yet the policy went ahead anyway. It’s far from the only policy in recent decades that’s been allowed to blight our lives because of the absence of a dose of common sense at the outset. So how ‘smart’ is government? And how could we make it smarter by bringing common sense into play?

Smart motorways go back fifteen years. The government of the time faced the problem that motorways were clogging up with traffic. But how to make traffic flow more freely without the huge expense of adding extra lanes? Answer: ‘let’s use the hard shoulder’. Hard shoulders had been obligatory on motorways ever since they started being built in the late 1950s: they were a vital safety measure so that when cars broke down they could easily pull off the road and get out of the way of the traffic speeding up behind them. But there they lay, a ready-built fourth lane, usually completely empty, just waiting to be used to free up congestion. ‘Smart motorways’ were born. The idea was that ‘emergency refuge areas’ would be created every mile or so at the side of the motorway for broken down vehicles to stumble towards, out of danger, and fancy radar technology would spot trouble when it happened and use illuminated gantry signs to steer upcoming traffic away from the breakdown. All very ‘smart’.

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