Barking Mad?
Roads Minister on road charging
Road charging is a great idea, discuss...
The debate on road charging has begun in earnest, catalysed by the massive vote of disapproval reflected in the e-petition that attracted close to two million signatures.
The first major 'outing' for the proposals following the closure of the petition came with a press briefing in Westminster at which Transport minister Stephen Ladyman made the keynote speech. The ROAD was invited and the editor managed to submit a question to the panel assembled by the Social Market Foundation who are leading on this issue. First let's look at a few highlights from the Minister's speech.
Forty-three years ago I was standing, aged twelve, in my first school election as the Communist candidate! The Beatles were conquering America. Harold Wilson was moving into 10 Downing Street for the first time. And that year - 1964 - the total distance driven by road vehicles in the UK was 152 billion kilometres.
Today, road traffic in Britain covers around 500 billion kilometres a year.
Even with our planned investment of over £140 billion in the 10 years to 2015, congestion is predicted to increase by another 25% by then.
We've more than doubled investment in transport since 1997, spending over £6.5 billion this year on buses and trains. We are pushing ahead with a vital road building and improvement programme - increasing capacity where it can be justified economically and environmentally, and where it can best help relieve congestion hot-spots. But, together, all these measures are not enough.
If we do nothing then we manage road space in the very worst way possible. By congestion and by gridlock which threatens to inflict £22 billion worth of economic damage from wasted time by 2025. While we recognise that the public are sceptical of the case for road pricing, we cannot, and will not, do nothing.
But that said, national road pricing is far from a 'done deal'.
The discussion centred on fear, and myth-making.
- Myth 1. National road pricing would be an additional tax on top of current motoring taxes.
No. As the 2005 Labour Party Manifesto stated: "we will seek political consensus in tackling congestion, including examining the potential of moving away from the current system of motoring taxation towards a national system of road-pricing." Road pricing is about changing the way we pay for road use. If we decide to go ahead with a national scheme, we would clearly have to review the way fuel and cars are taxed. - Myth 2. Road pricing is just a revenue-raiser for the Government.
No it's not. It's about tackling congestion - by addressing the concentration of vehicles on particular roads at specific times of the day. Any money raised by local pilot schemes would be used to improve transport in those communities. - Myth 3. The Government just wants to stop people travelling.
Absolutely not. The surest way to stop drivers travelling is to allow congestion to build until the roads are at a standstill. Local pilots are the best way to test road pricing as a concept, to test the potential technologies, to test the effects on congestion, to gauge the reaction of motorists and business. - Myth 5. Everyone will have to pay £1.34 for each mile travelled.
This is one of those ridiculous myths that's been quoted on a regular basis. £1.34 was one of many charges in one of many hypothetical scenarios presented in a research document 3 years ago. It related only to journeys on the most congested roads at the very busiest times of day - just one half of one percent of road travel. A bottom limit of 2p a mile was also proposed, but that's seldom mentioned. - Myth 6. Road pricing will be about spying on people.
Wrong. Again, road pricing's about tackling congestion. Protecting people's privacy will be a central consideration in any scheme design. For example, any data on vehicle location could be held by a trusted third party. After all, your mobile phone company can work out where you are, and nobody seems to worry that they'll abuse this information. - Myth 7. We'll all have to spend £600 on black boxes.
No. We're still looking at different types of technology - and if a scheme does eventually get the green light, it would have to be affordable and straightforward to implement. If there needs to be extra equipment in your car, it may well be provided by the charge collector, not by the user.
A British Chamber of Commerce poll of members, for example, found 87% backed our strategy.
But - quite sensibly - those businesses would also want to see any road pricing scheme as one part of a package to address congestion. The Government wholeheartedly agrees. This is why we have said that any local pilot scheme must be partnered with improvements in public transport. And this is why we have said that if we decided in the years ahead to introduce national road pricing, we would have to review the way fuel and cars are taxed.
Ian Mutch has a go
OK that's the Minister's take on this and there is no point pretending that a problem does not exist, while building our way out of gridlock with another million miles of asphalt is not a desirable option for anyone but the most extreme petrolheads. In concluding his presentation the Minister issued a warning specifically to the press that if we opposed road charging per, se we are 'barking mad.'
Notwithstanding the reservations most of us have about road charging per se, it is MAG's responsibility to lobby for an exemption for motorcycles should such a scheme eventually come into being. This was the question I eventually managed to put to eco zealot Stephen Joseph of Transport 2000 who sat on the panel of experts headlined by the Minister. His view was that bikes are not as green as we like to make out and we should pay, albeit at a lower rate than cars. Interestingly he thought that the emissions standards for motorcycles were more lax than for cars. The reality is that they have been but are steadily catching up and new motorcycle production must achieve the same values as do cars in the near future.
At the end of the meeting The ROAD had a few minutes with 'The First Lady' of Road Charging, Ann Rossiter, Director of The Social Market Foundation, a registered charity which is promoting road charging. There were a number of questions hanging in the air from the Minister's speech which were bothering me.
Road tax dodgers
One thing the minister suggested was that the road charging technology could address the issue of the two million 'Herberts' currently estimated to be driving around with no road tax or insurance.
Now this all sounds very fine until one considers that it isn't long since a series of TV ads were claiming that road tax defaulters could be identified without recourse to any police sleuth effort but simply by looking at computer screens. In effect, the advert claimed, all defaulters could be identified and cleared up overnight, so why haven't they been? Simply because the system can only identify those who have at some time logged their vehicles on to it. So the driver who has paid road tax and then let it expire, will be caught, but criminals who have never registered the cars in their own name or at their own address, will sail on blissfully tripping speed cameras or road charging monitors galore and no-one will have the slightest idea who or where they are. No doubt if enough police effort were put to the task they could be tracked, but if the two million estimate is anywhere near half the truth, where is all the police manpower to come from?
As with warfare, you can do what you like from the air but ultimately you need force on the ground to really get to grips with a situation. At present the fines for driving without insurance are so much lower than the premiums that those on the edge are simply taking a chance.
Revenue neutral
The claim that this system will be revenue neutral aroused some debate at the Westminster meeting. Times Motoring Correspondent Ben Webster asked if the calculation of neutrality considered the set up costs, ie the vast infrastructure of surveillance apparatus. The answer to this was that a private company such as Capita, who run London's congestion zone collection, would be engaged to avoid any burden on the taxpayer. The notion that revenue neutrality will be achieved however looks set to join the minister's collection of myths since a strictly neutral system would not provide investment for public transport developments which represent one of the scheme's objectives.
It was furthermore suggested that insurance companies might lead the way. This is a worrying element of the plot since it raises the realistic short term spectre of discounts for those who bare their soul to their insurers. Accept spy devices that monitor speed and usage to enjoy lower premiums? Conversely, try to protect your privacy and pay through the nose? The chilling reality is that the first half of this kind of initiative is already being offered by some insurers and as with crash helmets, once you have a high level of voluntary compliance... bingo !
What though is the real purpose of road charging?
- Is it primarily about cutting CO2 emissions?
- Is it about raising money?
- Is it about enhancing business efficiency and protecting quality of life through cutting congestion?
The official line seems to be that it is primarily about no 3, though there are environmental lobbies hanging on to the coat tails of this bandwagon in pursuit of reduced carbon targets.
I put the question bluntly to Ann Rossiter. If you want to cut CO2 emissions and penalise gas guzzlers, why don't you jack up fuel tax? The immediate response was that this didn't seem to be very popular. And road charging is ... ?
Now no-one likes paying more for petrol but the notion that it is now exorbitantly expensive is definitely a myth. In real terms, ie relative to average earnings, petrol is now cheaper than it has been at any time since the early seventies.
Could it be that by introducing road charging the government spreads the variety of taxation mechanisms so that none individually appear conspicuously inflated?
Well notwithstanding the two million-ish signatures on the e-petition, the claim is nonetheless made, albeit by the proponents of Road Charging, that a large majority of people are in favour of it, though they seem less enthusiastic about signing petitions on line. At the time of the press call, the counter petition had attracted no more than a few thousand signatures.
Of course the Achilles heal in the whole road charging plan is that it assumes that those who it will 'persuade' to drive at different times or by different routes have the flexibility to do so, a point which Ann Rossiter conceded as moot.
An advantage of road pricing over fuel tax which is being quoted, is that it can selectively penalise car use in congested areas where alternatives are practical, and be more liberal to rural communities for whom the transport options are more limited.
At the start of the debate the point was emphatically made that 'this is not about stopping people driving.' In contemporary political speak that means of course that this is precisely about stopping people driving. So there we have it, the story so far. Members views are welcome.
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