Whitehall and Roads: A Case Study of Sectoral Politics

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Abstract
Trunk road policy in England is best seen as a case of sectoral policy making, that is the evolution of commitments within narrow conceptual and institutional boundaries. To build trunk roads it was necessary to construct and defend a self-contained world of roads policy and programme implementation. In the 1950s and 60s an internally accountable set of organisations and routines emerged, with their own logic and a seemingly inexorable momentum. This division of the world into sectoral specialities is a key part of government policy making, and the roads case demonstrates the pressures that exist towards fragmentation within government, while highlighting the artificiality of this fragmentation. Challenges were mounted from the outside world – from local communities and from environmentalists – which could not be contained or co-opted by the roads men. Governments were forced to react and the roads programme declined. However, this occurred as much by internal dissolution – the impossibility of implementation in the face of protest – as from an act of central co-ordination or reappraisal. It seems that such acts are severely limited by the political and administrative structures and logics of distinct policy sectors.

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