Ruth Kelly MP, Transport Secretary

The Transport Secretary defends expansion of UK airports and increase in flights. Ruth Kelly says: 'we should not be telling people what form of transport they take'.

ANDREW MARR: Now during the week there were great celebrations to mark the reopening of St. Pancras Station in London.

A new era of fast travel to Paris, Brussels and beyond.

At the same time the government announced border checks which, it's claimed, could turn the simplest day trip abroad into a bureaucratic nightmare, and security is to be stepped up at stations and airports.

So, far from getting easier is travelling set to become even more hassle? I'm joined by the Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly.

Thank you very much indeed for coming in Ruth Kelly. Let's go through first of all some of the new barriers, the physical barriers.

But there's also going to be lots more scanning, presumably many more queues at, for instance, train stations.

RUTH KELLY: Well, to pick up on your first point, I think this is about enabling people to travel safely and securely with minimal hassle, which is why we've got to get these measures proportionate. And I was very pleased to see Lord West this morning saying in an interview that actually if we implement these measures we'll have one of the most secure and safe systems in the country.

ANDREW MARR: Well some of will be very pleased to see Lord West this morning, but moving on from that, nonetheless there are going to be systems of scanning, presumably a little bit like airports, at major train stations, aren't there?

RUTH KELLY: Well what we've got to do is do this in a proportionate way, and operational decisions will always be for the police. But I think it's right that they have the facility to do that when they think that's necessary.

ANDREW MARR: So it won't necessarily happen that every time one goes to Kings Cross or Newcastle station, or York station, you'll have to go through scanners and standing in a queue.

RUTH KELLY: That's right. Those are matters for the police and they'll have to make their judgements on the basis of the evidence and what they think the likely threat is and so forth. What we will see, I think, is probably the sort of larger plant pots around the place to stop cars driving into stations, and protective measures outside stations which make that sort of tactic...

ANDREW MARR: So it's harder to drop off your elderly granny at the station by car in future?

RUTH KELLY: Well harder to pick up speed and accelerate into the front of a building, as we saw. And the great example here, I think, is Glasgow airport where the attempt on Glasgow airport happened just a few days after I took this post.

And one of the lessons that we drew from that is that the protection that had been designed into the system so that cars actually had to take a rather convoluted route to the airport meant that a car couldn't pick up speed very quickly, and therefore the building was protected. And I think it's that sort of sensible design which is so important.

ANDREW MARR: The papers, particularly the Daily Mail, listed 53 questions I think it was that we're all going to have to answer before we can travel abroad. That surely, well that feels to many people unnecessarily intrusive and disproportionate, will put people off travelling?

RUTH KELLY: Well I think those are questions about immigration and I think people want us to have a fair and tough immigration system. Well I think they're bringing together information, actually, and some of these questions are replacing what's already there. But the question for me is how do we make our system secure without interrupting people's daily lives so much?

ANDREW MARR: But if you get on this new Eurostar train, or I do, and go to Paris, am I going to have to stand there or sit there and answer 53 questions?

RUTH KELLY: Well at the moment when you get on Eurostar you have to go through barriers and you have to fill in information and immigration questions and so forth. And we're not...

ANDREW MARR: You just have to show your passport, you go straight through.

RUTH KELLY: We're not talking about completely new systems here, we're talking about the E-border system that the Home Office is proposing, coming into effect, which will enable them in due course to count in the number of people entering and leaving the country. And I think that's something that most people want to see us do.

ANDREW MARR: But just a yes or no on those 53 questions.

RUTH KELLY: Well I think this is a measure that the Home Office have proposed on E-borders which will mean some extra information is provided.

ANDREW MARR: So yes, probably.

RUTH KELLY: Well I don't know quite how many questions there's going to be but we do need to know who's entering and leaving the country.

ANDREW MARR: Right. Somebody said to me about your time so far at the Transport Department, that you must be the most anti-environmental Transport Secretary so far. You want to greatly increase the number of flights and expand all our airports.

National road pricing seems to be coming back off the agenda. It's more cars, more flights, more planes, emissions, just at the time when Gordon Brown says that we have to wake up to the importance of climate change?

RUTH KELLY: Well I'd like to be remembered as the Transport Secretary takes these issues really, really seriously actually, and produces a transport policy which delivers against our CO2 objective.

ANDREW MARR: So how does it...

RUTH KELLY: Well one of the things that I was very struck by when coming to this job, and I, you know, read the Nick Stern report on the environment, I'm very slive to the fact that we've got to take action now as a government.

But also the Eddington report which says we've got to underpin our economic growth with really good transport connections. But the message from both of them was we can achieve our CO2 objections if we implement these measures in a cost-effective way.

ANDREW MARR: I'm sorry to stop you there, but a lot of people simply can't understand that you're going to, can you remind me how many extra flights the Heathrow expansion's going to mean?

RUTH KELLY: Well it will go up from something like 480,000 a year an increased capacity by another 30% or something like that if the runway gets....

ANDREW MARR: To seven hundred and something thousand, that's an awful lot of extra flights at a time we're being told that the increase in flights is one of the major preventable increases of extra carbon going into the atmosphere and, as between those two objectives you seem to be going completely for more flights?

RUTH KELLY: Well you're right to raise the question but what I completely reject is this sort of, this sort of false choice that's been set up. I think the Tories have done this in spades actually. Which is the sort of Zac Goldsmith, you can't have airlines leaving or airport expansion at any cost.

To be green somehow that means putting an absolute constraint on aviation. Or indeed the Redwood argument which is in order to underpin our economy we've got to have a free for all on aviation.

ANDREW MARR: I still don't get it though, Ruth Kelly.

RUTH KELLY: There is a way through this and that is carbon trading where by full engagements in the European Union we can set a cap on total EU aviation emissions and within that we find the most cost-effective way of achieving these gains.

ANDREW MARR: So we fly more and more and more. We have more and more and more airports and, I don't know, the Walloons or the Czechs or somebody fly less, that's the idea is it?

RUTH KELLY: Well we need to fully engage in Europe so that every tonne of carbon that is emitted from a plane is matched somewhere else in Europe by a reduction in carbon. Now that's the market...

ANDREW MARR: Surely everyone's got to do their bit. How can you say that we are the country that can fly more and more, can drive more and more, and some foreigners over the road can do less?

RUTH KELLY: Well we will do out bit. And one of the things I want to show is how the Transport Department as a whole can make real significant contributions to reducing CO2. But within that we shouldn't be telling people what form of transport they take, we should be providing the options...

ANDREW MARR: Why not?

RUTH KELLY: ... investing in technology, trading in carbon and let the individuals make their choices. And that means just take cars for example. There's a really good example, that, you know, if we really invest in technology and we set a framework whereby 2020, or 2030 or 2050, car manufacturers know exactly what's expected of them. By 2050 we might have a situation in which cars are carbon free.

ANDREW MARR: Yes if, you know, the technology is there, and if General Motors and other people produce electric cars they might save you. But that's not politicians helping, that's the market, that's industrialism doing it.

RUTH KELLY: Well it's both. It's government setting the framework and individuals and companies working within that framework to deliver change. And that's I think the right way of doing it, which is us being ambitious and others, you know, investing in the right technology.

ANDREW MARR: I was asking Michael Gove about grammar schools. Why have you done a U-turn on national car pricing, or a national road pricing?

RUTH KELLY: We haven't. And actually I'm a bit bemused by that accusation. What we've got to do and this is what we are doing, is implement our policy.

ANDREW MARR: So we are going to see national road pricing?

RUTH KELLY: Well, we've always said that even if we wanted to put our foot down on the accelerator as it were, to coin a phrase...

ANDREW MARR: Which you clearly do.

RUTH KELLY: To coin a phrase, and see national road pricing, that that would take a number of years to implement while we develop the technology. In the meantime we ought to concentrate on tackling urban congestion where congestion consists.

80% of all congestion is in our towns and cities. Now London is leading the way on this. We have said to other cities and towns across the country, come to us with real proposals and we will back that with really significant sums of public infrastructure in transport so that people can make the choices about how they travel.

ANDREW MARR: So from time to time we'll see cities and towns possibly introduce a congestion charging on the London model. But what about those rather important bits of roads between them? How far away are we in terms of time, do you think, before we see road pricing for motorways and trunk roads?

RUTH KELLY: Well first of all 80% of congestion is in our towns and cities and 80% of the growth of it over the next 10 to 15 years is in our towns and cities so I wouldn't underestimate that as a contribution to the challenge. In the meantime what we've got to do about the rest of the network is really examine what technology will be needed.

I mean people have real concerns about this, they've concerns not just about the revenue which they clearly have, but also about privacy and enforceability of any system. And if we were to introduce this system we'd need to understand all of those dynamics. Now for the next two or three years we are working, with the industry to try and develop and test systems against those...

ANDREW MARR: So it's a technical question rather than a political one. It's going to come, road pricing, once you've got the technology there to do it?

RUTH KELLY: Well it would need public support and we've always been clear about that, and people will judge it both against the technical specifications but also about how schemes in towns and cities develop.

ANDREW MARR: What about trains, because I said at the beginning St Pancras, fantastic new thing, fast to France and all the rest of it. People were pointing out almost immediately, yeh, but it can take seven hours to get to Cornwall, six hours to get to Cumbria. Our current railway system is very expensive, old, slow, and yet there aren't plans from the government to build more railways.

RUTH KELLY: Oh I don't recognise that characterisation at all. I recently set out a rail White Paper which set the path for the railway to double in size over the next 30 years.

ANDREW MARR: But that's more carriages on existing track, it's not more track.

RUTH KELLY: It is, it is, and we have the fastest growing railway in Europe at the moment. And the big priority for us as a nation at the moment is not new lines and perhaps faster speed trains although they might be options for the future.

ANDREW MARR: If I may say so in sort of Cumbria or the West Country so we do need faster trains and we do need more lines.

RUTH KELLY: Well they may in the future, but the big priority for us at the moment is to make the existing connections work better, and that means making sure more people can travel on them in greater comfort, tackling pinchpoints where they arise, making sure we have a railway which runs efficiently to time that people can rely on. And if we get that right and we're investing in another 1300 carriages, this is the biggest investment for a generation in our railway system, we have the opportunity to see it expand very rapidly over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. In the future of course we'll have to think about other lines.

ANDREW MARR: And this is being paid for, disproportionately, a lot of people who have to use the trains by higher fares rather than by tax revenue?

RUTH KELLY: Well the government's investing �10 billion over the five-year period from 2009 which is a huge investment in extra capacity. Taxpayers are already paying a very major component of this. Fare-payers of course will pay some. But what has happened is that premium and first-class fares have gone up whereas standard fares have been regulated very toughly by the government.

ANDREW MARR: A bit of class warrior there you see right at the end. Ruth Kelly thank you very much indeed.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

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