‘The legacy of Barbara Castle should still drive Labour’s approach to transport policy’

As a child in the 1960s, one of the first political figures I remember was Barbara Castle. While many recall her for her work delivering the Equal Pay Act, I look to her efforts on transport issues as a source of particular inspiration for my work as Chair of the Transport Select Committee.

Barbara was only a Transport Minister for three years, yet she made a number of sweeping reforms. She identified the high number of road deaths as a critical issue that needed fixing and introduced several major reforms, such as requiring new cars to have seatbelts, introducing breathalyser tests, and making the 70 mph speed limit permanent on motorways. Whilst most would now consider these changes common sense, the public backlash at the time was extreme. One journalist even said:“You’re only a woman, you don’t drive — what do you know about it? I reckon I can take five pints and drive better than most people any day of the week.”

The level of vitriol was intense, and much of the abuse directed at Barbara was highly personal. Yet she understood that policy decisions should be based on facts. She ignored the noise and pushed ahead.

Within a year of the introduction of the breathalyser tests, road deaths had dropped by 16%, and in the decades that followed, fatalities on our roads continued to decline. Barbara also introduced other innovative changes in transport, such as halting the second round of Beeching cuts to the railways and later introducing Motability grants for disabled drivers. She firmly believed that public transport was a means to an end and that the focus should always be on the user, whether that’s someone in a small village needing a train service or pedestrians expecting safe roads.

There is much we can learn from her approach to politics. The immediate reaction to a policy or its popularity in an opinion poll should not be the sole measure of its effectiveness. To give a modern example when London Mayor Sadiq Khan expanded the ULEZ, I was told I would lose re-election in my outer London seat. Yet I won in 2024, and we are now seeing lower levels of toxic air pollution across outer London.

Social media has introduced a “sugar high” quality to politics, making it even harder to ignore the noise. We need to take a pragmatic look not just at the evidence base behind transport policies but also at the very real impact they will have on all of us. Feeding individual policies into a polling vortex can only get you so far.

I know that Transport Ministers face difficult decisions over the next decade, especially around fuel duty, public subsidies for trains and bus routes, and how we address the carbon cost of flying. Road safety also remains a challenge as in recent years, the UK’s success in cutting road deaths and serious injuries has flatlined. 

To address that, Lilian Greenwood, now the Minister for Local Transport, will soon be introducing the Labour Government’s Road Safety Strategy. I hope that she is able to propose brave, evidence-based solutions and get them through Parliament, as Barbara Castle did with such success.

Barbara was from a different age, but her career as a minister and politician can still teach us so much.

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