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Road Pricing

I am grateful, Sir Nicholas. Thank you for correcting me on the protocol. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), I had not intended to speak in this debate but I have been inspired by the oratory that has preceded me. With your permission, Sir Nicholas, I should like to take a slightly different, if controversial, tack, based primarily on chapter 4 of the Committee's excellent report, which concentrates on setting the road pricing debate in the context of other ways to tackle congestion, and the Government's response to that in paragraph 7. I have a strong constituency interest in mind. As I mentioned in an earlier intervention, Kettering and Northamptonshire form part of one of the Government's growth areas and north Northamptonshire is obliged to deliver 52,100 houses between 2001 and 2021. That will increase the population of north Northamptonshire by about a third. The local road network simply cannot cope. The main road—the A14, which is a road of national and European importance—is already beyond its design limits. Some 70,000 cars a day travel around Kettering. You do not need to take my word for it, Sir Nicholas. The Highways Agency itself is tackling congestion locally by imposing article 14 directions on house builders who have planning permission for new developments. Those directions forbid them from building more than a small number of their planning allocations, on the basis that the local road network cannot cope. The point has been made that although these thoughts about a national road pricing scheme are in many senses welcome, it is already tremendously late. In constituencies such as mine, another Department is driving through another agenda, and it seems to me that the Department for Transport and the Highways Agency have not been made aware of the need for urgency in providing the necessary transport infrastructure up front. My short point is that, as far as tackling congestion is concerned, road pricing has many merits for the future, but by 2014, which is the earliest date by which the Government say that they can introduce it, there will already be tens of thousands of new houses in and around the Kettering constituency, and the local road network, which is already congested, will be approaching gridlock.