Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd may be a minister in a mere regional government, as opposed to a national government, but it is still absurd that he is responsible for every inch of road and pavement in Northern Ireland.
Welsh transport secretary Ken Skates only has to look after his region’s strategic road network: 75 miles of motorway and 1,000 miles of major trunk roads. The remaining 95 per cent of roads in Wales are the responsibility of councils.
The same system operates in Scotland, England and the Republic. Most of the world entrusts local roads to local authorities and would consider it bizarre to do otherwise.
Yet at Stormont, the Department for Infrastructure has sole responsibility for everything – all 16,000 miles of road and 6,000 miles of pavement, urban and rural, major and minor, including signs, street lights and verges, while also looking after public transport, water, rivers, ports and planning.
As a result, Mr O’Dowd and his officials must devise strategic transport policy and projects while also dealing with a vast number of petty distractions. It is their job and theirs alone to fill in every pothole, trim every hedge and re-paint every road marking, everywhere.
In the past week, the department has passed a law imposing parking restrictions on a bicycle path in Dunmurry, earned widespread ridicule for failing to pedestrianise half a street in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, and caused gridlock across the city’s trunk roads by putting traffic lights in the wrong place around the new Grand Central Station, then scheduling roadworks on the Sydenham Bypass.
Responding to complaints about the traffic chaos, Mr O’Dowd said people in rural areas would envy the investment in Belfast and be “aghast” at the city’s MLAs moaning about some inevitable disruption. Such exasperation suggests a minister who is fed up listening to petty grumbles, but that comes with the job of looking after every patch of tarmac from Belfast to Belleek.
So why not copy the rest of the world and devolve local roads to councils? The case for this in Belfast appears clear.
Lack of detailed local knowledge and care has turned the city centre into a monument to bad planning. Roads, pavements, bus lanes and cycle paths are all dysfunctional and a source of public aggravation. Many residential areas are neglected rat-runs and parking free-for-alls.
Councillors and council officials waste years begging the department to perform simple tasks, such as installing pedestrian crossings – in most of England, people can fill in a form and have their council do this within months. Increasingly, Belfast’s councillors are calling for more powers to look after the roads and pavements themselves.
Local road powers were considered during the Review of Public Administration, which began in 2002 and led to the creation of the ‘super-councils’ in 2015. Sinn Féin and the DUP both felt it was better to keep powers at Stormont, essentially because Northern Ireland is too small, although both parties still wanted councils to have a greater role in decision-making.
Even that has scarcely happened. An attempt was made a decade ago to transfer powers from the department to Belfast City Council, along with 400 civil servants. It did not succeed for reasons that remain unexplained – staff apparently had no objection. Could this be revisited?
The concern about Northern Ireland’s size becomes more of an issue outside Belfast. In Britain and the Republic, councils manage roads at the county level, serving populations several times larger than the 10 super-councils beyond Belfast.
Northern Ireland might need only four local roads authorities by this measure; it may be no coincidence that the department’s Roads Division is split into four geographic areas, with offices in Belfast, Coleraine, Craigavon and Omagh. However, several councils could cooperate to run a local roads division, just as they have formed partnerships for city deals.
Despite all the talk at Stormont of the urgent need for public sector reform, there is little appetite for shuffling responsibilities around. Devolution was only restored seven months ago, it is less than three years until the next election, and too many people still recall the Reform of Public Administration as an exhausting, protracted and problematic process.
Many councillors and council officials will also wondering if they want the grief that comes with looking after the roads. But the idea could at least be put back on the agenda as an option.
Leaving everything to the Department for Infrastructure is not going to make the problem go away.
In the past week, the Department for Infrastructure has passed a law imposing parking restrictions on a bicycle path in Dunmurry, earned widespread ridicule for failing to pedestrianise half a street in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, and caused gridlock across the city’s trunk roads by putting traffic lights in the wrong place around the new Grand Central Station, then scheduling roadworks on the Sydenham Bypass