The list of ex-ministers should include Sir David Mitchell (1983 - 88, in two roles) at DfT» .
He with SoS Nicholas Ridley (Civil Engineer) put through much of the 1980's electrification.
He should have his statue at KX IMHO▸ , Tory or not.
OTC
Growing up as I did in Portsmouth on the South Coast in the 1980s, Ridley is probably the one that sticks in my mind too.
On the minus side:
Bus deregulation and the privatisation/selling off into many pieces of the National Bus Company was steered through on Ridley's watch. Apart from the obvious overnight change and upheaval I remember at the time, I am always mindful of two longer-term effects this policy has had.
1) Before bus deregulation, it was not made obvious to passengers exactly which bus services or journeys on a particular route were loss-making. Once bus deregulation took place though, timetables suddenly began to show the note "Operated under contract to X County Council", thus making the difference between commercial and subsidised journeys very clear.
This system worked ok in the early days when local authorities had the resources and bus subsidies based on social need were higher up the priority list, and actually worked in a largely positive way when successive Labour governments had ring-fenced transport grants to give out to fund such bus services with.
However, one of the first things that the incoming Conservative-led government did in 2010 was to remove the transport grants, and what funding remained available was no longer ring-fenced and often got diverted to other things that councils saw as a higher priority. This led immediately to a bonfire of evening and Sunday bus services, and as time has gone on has to led to a situation where central government has lit the fuse in the form of ever-reducing council funding, and then thrown the bomb over to passengers, bus companies and local authorities to play bus cuts pass the parcel with. This manifests itself in the kind of battles over disappearing bus services that we often document on this forum, and which central government has contrived to stand as far away as possible from despite creating the conditions for such disputes in the first place.
2) We often discuss on the forum how we can best integrate bus and rail ticketing. However, what people have forgotten over time is that prior to bus deregulation, it was the norm to have integrated bus and rail travelcards, certainly in the towns and cities on the south coast where I grew up. Overnight though, all the new bus companies seemingly brought out their standalone products, with hardly any negotiating the continuation of arrangements with rail. Ironically, a key reason not as much progress has been made as one would have liked in the interim is due to fear of the very competition laws that were allegedly there to improve things for passengers in the first place.
Also, I remember very clearly the closures of Radipole, and that of Eridge-Tunbridge Wells, and it was those examples that first encouraged me to look into the circumstances and reasoning behind rail closures. Both were signed off by Ridley.
On the plus side:
Many see the mid-1980s as the beginning of a period of rail renaissance, and there was definite progress beginning to be made. The Eridge-Tunbridge Wells closure was directly linked to the Tonbridge-Hastings electrification scheme, which was announced just after Ridley became Transport Secretary, completed just before he left, and was (as OTC said earlier) the forerunner of a number of electrification schemes both in the South East and elsewhere.
Network SouthEast was launched towards the end of the Ridley era, and had a huge positive effect, both practically and visually on the rail network in my part of the world, providing the perfect vehicle for a renaissance vision both in terms of refresh/rebrand, and the practical modernisation steps such as the Solent and Weymouth electrification that was to come.
Let's not forget also that Melksham station reopened in 1985 in the Ridley era and sparked what is very likely to be my lifelong interest in the TransWilts, and that it was a forerunner of the slew of such station openings/reopenings through to the early 1990s.
Leaving aside Ridley and looking in overall terms, given my priority in terms of public transport has always been geared more towards the expansion of the rail and bus networks, rail-wise I would probably look more favourably towards the Conservative Transport Secretaries on the list for their role in 80s/early 90s rail network expansion and latterly in the 2010s onwards for finally sorting the TransWilts and overseeing the New Stations Fund, and less favourably on Labour Transport Secretaries for utter inertia on network expansion, their botched creation and handling of the Strategic Rail Authority, and their complete disinterest in the TransWilts. On bus, it would be the other way round, with Conservative Transport Secretaries failing on bus deregulation and enabling latter-day devastating bus network cuts and contraction, while Labour made genuine attempts to provide funding that stabilised and in rural areas often expanded bus network service provision.
It's a very subjective thing though - I completely get that if (for example) your priority for rail is reliability/punctuality over network expansion, or if you have had a career in the rail industry, you may well have a completely different take
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