Back to the Sheat Report

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28895, 15 May 1959, Page 10

Back to the Sheat Report

The intention of the Minister of Works (Mr Watt) to seek amendment of the basis of local body subsidies under the National Roads Act is excellent, because it is desirable to relate these subsidies to the amounts local authorities actually spend on roads. This was the principle of the report made by the committee headed by Mr W. A. Sheat, M.P., which proposed that expenditure on county roads and city streets should be directly subsidised and that the municipalities should receive an additional subsidy to compensate them for having to provide virtually the continuation of State highways. The reason for calculating the urban highway subsidy on population was presumably to meet the wish of municipalities. At any rate, it was this wish of municipalities that led the last Government to agree that all municipal subsidies should be based on population, regardless of the length of arterial road a city had to provide and the amount it was prepared to spend on it. Having made this concession to municipal shortsightedness, it was natural enough for the Government to defer to the wish of counties that their subsidies should be based not on what roading cost them but on their collection of

rates, regardless of how the rate revenue was spent. These concessions seriously weakened the Sheat committee’s conception of improving the roads by the proceeds of special taxes on motorists. It should never have been a question of suiting the convenience of local authorities with inadequate accounting systems, but of keeping faith with the motorists who were called on to find the money.

Now that municipalities have at last realised that the demand on their roading systems prohibits any saving of their rate expenditure on streets, they are prepared to go back to the Sheat report and obtain subsidies according to their needs. Mr Watt suggests that the change will mean larger subsidies for cities, as it should while they are prepared to find their own share of the cost of roading improvements. However, the increase cannot be very great unless the National Roads Board’s total revenue is increased. This can be done only by’ the Government releasing some of the extra petrol tax it has levied. The real importance of Mr Watt’s proposal is that it should ensure the spending of the motorists’ money where it will give the best return in roading—in the counties as well as in the cities.