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Road Pricing

: My hon. Friend raises an important point. The Government sought views on whether to carry out more detailed work on building a private expressway as an alternative to widening the M6, and our report looked at the implications of that. There was a 50:1 ratio of responses against the M6 expressway, but the Department announced that further work would be commissioned. It then said:"““There is a balance to be struck between maintaining controls over toll levels and the commercial viability of a toll road scheme and the extent of risk transfer to the private sector.””" As we know from many private finance initiative and public-private partnership schemes, the hazard with such an approach is that very little risk is transferred to the private sector. What is even worse, as we highlighted, is the absurdity of the Government suggesting that they would produce an integrated charging scheme on the roads for which they had direct responsibility only to disclose to the Committee that a road in the middle of it all was controlled and owned by a private firm. That stretch of road might or might not be doing what it is supposed to do, but the Government have no way of controlling the charging system for it. We pointed out that it was quite extraordinary for the Government to move forward with what ought to be a unified scheme at national level without considering the implications of reaching an agreement on certain bits of road and issues such as the M6 widening, which would remove the Government's responsibility and control.