Current Awareness Bulletin

You may well have seen or heard CILT making the news last Friday – thanks in large part to the efforts of all of you who answered our member survey on the Government’s Spending Review.

The Institute’s President, Sir Moir Lockhead, did the rounds of BBC Breakfast News; Radio 4’s Today Programme; Radio 5 Live and Sky News to explain the results. In addition Sir Moir and our Chief Executive spoke to journalists from The Times, the FT, The Telegraph, etc etc as well as many leading trade journals from Motor Transport to Rail Professional.

What caught the attention of the news media were some of the strong results of the survey. We asked participants to put themselves in the position of the Secretary of State for Transport. He’s been told he has to make savings in the order of 25% - so members weren’t able to just keep spending. There’s no doubt it was a challenging exercise.

75% of you felt supporting economic growth should be the clear priority of the Governments Spending review; HS2 was strongly supported by 79%, Smarter Choices were also backed strongly. Of course the downside of protecting these areas is that something else has to give; and it was road capacity, socially inclusive services (19%), rural accessibility, and health and safety (17%) that you identified as areas where government spend could be reduced. Difficult choices, of course.

You and I could spend a long time discussing the details of the findings over a wee dram – and of course just because Government spending in certain areas needs to be cut doesn’t mean things shouldn’t be funded in other ways – a point many of you made strongly in your responses.

Now the British media wouldn’t be the British media without emphasising the negative where possible – good news never sells as well as bad news is the axiom of every journalist – I know, I’ve been one in a previous life.

Some of the questions from journalists were distinctly left of field. But Sir Moir played the questions down with a straight bat, and scored some excellent boundaries with his emphasis on Smarter Choices and climate change.

The coverage, by the way, is ongoing. We’ve been busy after these appearances mopping up chatting to the likes of Parliament Today and the Beeb website team.

So what happens next? These findings are useful when talking to Government – and as a snapshot of what professionals think today. Won’t it be interesting to see the result of our follow up survey after the dust has settled on the impact of the cuts?

Of course all this is very much about strong PR for your Institute – our considered policies as an Institute are born out of careful deliberation by our Public Policy Committee. It’s really interesting to see how much members agree instinctively with PPC’s views on such things as road charging – which when faced with the alternatives does look more attractive!

If you want to find our more about what your fellow members said in the survey, click here to see the results on the website.

Oh, and if you disagree with any of the findings, don’t forget to take part in our next survey and ensure your views are represented!