---

Road Pricing

: If the Government intend to go ahead with a charging scheme, they have several responsibilities. First, they must tell us all what they want out of this scheme; they must say, ““We have agreed with this congestion scheme because it is the only way we can control the growth in traffic.”” At one point in their response, there is a suggestion that they accept that there will be consistent growth in traffic, although they do not call it exponential growth. If so, will the scheme deal with the problems we have highlighted? Will it mesh in with the little bits of private enterprise that are dumped down in the middle of the system? If not, who will control those roads? What effect will their policies have on the rest of the system? Who intends in the long run to at least make it clear on what basis decisions have been taken? We also discussed the lorry user charge. My Committee had previously discussed with the Department our very real worries about the fact that extra charges are levied on the road transport industry in many parts of Europe, and we said that we were concerned that several European nations were sending more and more units into this country—picking up goods, creating more traffic and developing all the time, but not paying comparable charges to those levied on British hauliers on the continent. We were told that the lorry road user charge would deal with that difficult problem. I have endeavoured to find out from the police authorities closest to the channel ports how many foreign lorries are being stopped, are breaking the law, are liable for fines and have been fined, but that information seems to be astonishingly confidential. No one is anxious to tell me anything; that is not new in my life, but it worries me considerably. It would be quite wrong of us to develop, even by default, a system of traffic control in which British hauliers who break road rules and are stopped by the police are taken to court—and fined, if needs be, if they are found guilty—but in which foreign hauliers in the same situation, who may have committed exactly the same crimes, and been stopped and cautioned by the police, are not charged because the local police know that the bother of dealing with them is too great. If we are not to have the lorry road user charge—there are a great many good and sensible reasons not to go ahead with that scheme—what will be the alternative in the short term? How are we to deal with that anomaly, and what are the Government's plans to charge foreign hauliers for the use of UK roads?