ABSTRACT
Cecil Parkinson, still Transport Secretary, celebrated the new decade with a long awaited report, ‘Trunk Roads-England into the 1990s’. The report, published in February 1990, included details of more than 500 road schemes but with a package of initiatives to reduce noise levels and improve road landscaping, which prompted Labour’s transport spokesman at the time, John Prescott, to describe the ‘greening’ of the roads programme as ‘a political sham’. It also led The Sunday Telegraph to carry an article, ‘Parkinson puts cars before green vote’ and to a good deal of speculation in the press about the differences of opinion between the DoT and the DoE.
