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Road Pricing

Had hundreds of hon. Members appeared here to speak about road user charging, many could have avoided the congestion charge on their way home by staying here until 5.30. I suppose the fact that they did not appear in droves proves that the charge is no significant deterrent to most people or at least not to people on MPs' salaries. If road user pricing is the answer, I would like to begin my little contribution by asking what the question is. It appears to be, ““What are we going to do about pollution and congestion?”” Both are thoroughly unacceptable. Pollution is unacceptable because of its connection with climate change, and congestion is unacceptable because individuals are inconvenienced and gross inefficiency is built into the economy. That will all be aggravated, according to Government statistics, by the projected 30 per cent. increase in road traffic; that will only make pollution and congestion worse. Pollution and congestion are related, but they are different problems, and solutions to pollution are not necessarily the same as solutions to congestion. For example, increased use of biofuels, which at least one hon. Member has mentioned so far, more efficient engines and so on provide a solution to pollution but do nothing for congestion. In fact, if there are fiscal incentives to use biofuels, the motorist may find that he can travel more cheaply. Similarly, solutions to the problem of congestion do not necessarily work for the problem of pollution. For example, one criticism made of road pricing in the Institute for Public Policy Research study mentioned in the Select Committee's report is that it runs the marginal risk of encouraging people to travel further, which will clearly do nothing for pollution. Road building is another solution to congestion that does nothing to ameliorate the pollution problem, although if cars wait longer because of congestion, whatever gain has been made by virtue of engine efficiency—and appreciable gains have been made over the last few decades—will be completely negated. The car will be sitting there with the engine revving over, going nowhere and at its polluting worst. There are, however, solutions that attack the problems of both congestion and pollution—for example, car sharing and boosting public transport. Before moving on to whether road pricing is the solution, may I make a few remarks about the Government's analysis? I would like some help, because they appear to be extrapolating figures for traffic growth from existing statistics and I wonder what that extrapolation is predicated on. A sceptic could argue that with demographic trends and the population becoming ever older—it is a known fact that older people are more reluctant to take long journeys and they travel less and use cars less—there will be disincentives in future for some people to travel. Is the projected 30 per cent. increase built on the optimistic assumption of economic expansion continuing as ever before? Is it based on increased car ownership? If we compare ourselves with other European countries, we see that there is scope for that. Compared with some other European countries, we have not yet maximised car ownership. Or is there an assumption that there will be a general increase in mobility due to the real cost of motoring remaining relatively static, and, perhaps, improving against people's net incomes? Does the projection allow for the effect of congestion, which retards mobility to some extent? Clearly, if travelling around the country by car is a deeply frustrating experience and is much slower than one expects, one tends to do it less. This is in no sense a criticism, but I want the 30 per cent. projection to be analysed in a little more detail, or for the Government to share their modelling, which would equally help, as the figure is an important element in considering what should and should not be done. Apart from road pricing, there are other well known mechanisms for dealing with congestion, one of which is to increase road capacity. That is often lampooned under the heading, ““Predict and provide.”” Some people suppose that one has only to build a road and it will immediately fill up with cars, but anyone who has had the lonely experience of travelling up and down the M58 will know that that is not the case. There are examples of roads being built that nobody uses, or that people do not use much. When increases in road use are analysed, an interesting pattern emerges. Over the past decade, according to figures that I have obtained—presumably the Department for Transport has the same figures—there has been a 36.6 per cent. increase in motorway use and a 21 per cent. increase in rural A road use, but the increase in the use of urban A roads is only 5 per cent., so there is a variant pattern. When one takes into account the fact that we have fewer motorway miles per car per head of population and by gross domestic product, the case for never increasing capacity and simply taking measures to restrain demand or ration road space is not unassailable. I am sure that all hon. Members will say, when canvassed, that they are against road building per se, but if one speaks to any of them for any length of time, one will find that there is a scheme in their area that they consider to be good and not to have any of the vices that road schemes in general are thought to have. If one reads the Transport Committee report carefully—I hope that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) will correct me if I misrepresent anything—one finds that there is an element of hedging bets. Although the capacity issue is not ignored, the Committee says that a pure building capacity solution is not a solution in any sense. That consensus is shared across party divides. I agree with the Committee that there is still scope to reinvigorate Government support for softer measures, such as quality bus contracts and improved support for public transport as—I believe that this expression is used in the Committee's report—goods in themselves. I do not want to stray into the unfortunate issue of trams yet. That is a difficult issue because although modal shift is encouraged with trams, it is at an appreciable price, which the Government are increasingly reluctant to pay. There are other obvious solutions to the congestion problem that should be pursued in parallel with road user pricing, such as the better use of ports and port capacity. I am enthusiastic about the expansion of my local port, Liverpool. Freight and road access to that port is severely hampered, but many containers could be taken off the M6 and the motorway network in general if it were a thriving port with good access. Currently, that situation does not entirely prevail, but it is a mechanism that could be used to do something about congestion, as is freight transfer to rail. I think that the Minister will accept that there is scope for that. The broad, sensible view—I think it is the Transport Committee's and probably the Minister's view, too—is that road user pricing is part of a tool kit; it is not the sole item or a magic bullet. Indeed, it is not even particularly new or radical, although the Secretary of State for Transport said that it was radical when he introduced it and sought to excite the House with his proposals. As has been said, road user pricing has been on the stocks for a long time and goes back to the turnpikes. All my life, I have paid to go through the Mersey tunnel to the Wirral; at one time, I did not know that that was road user pricing, but that is precisely what it is. There is also the Greater London authority experiment with congestion charging, which has been broadly supported this afternoon. We all agree with the principle of road user pricing and we are all comfortable with it. We do not really have a difficulty with it and we accept it in various contexts, although we perhaps object to it in schemes that we dislike. However, the principle is well embodied in the thinking of all serious people who apply themselves to considering how we can better transport ourselves around the country. The big issues are how far that principle will be extended and, equally importantly, what the details will be. We can have a brilliant scheme, but if we get the detail wrong, we shall generate a very unfortunate, adverse public response. In years gone by, I was the council leader in Southport, which is the constituency that I now represent. At one stage, I rationed parking on the streets by means of pay and display. I did that against appreciable political opposition, and there were processions through the streets calling for my dismissal, even though I was just a simple councillor at that stage. The scheme had to be introduced, and somebody would ultimately have had to do that, but when it was introduced, some of the details were not quite right and needed fine tuning. Once they were put right, and people understood what the scheme involved and what the benefits were, they rapidly adjusted to it. Obviously, I have lived to tell the tale politically, in so far as the constituents of Southport have, in their wisdom, elected me as their MP in the past two elections. The issue, therefore, is over-extension and detail. As I understand their current thinking, the Government favour a high-tech and, to some extent, a high-risk solution. It is an historically unprecedented nationwide solution, and I am not aware of anybody in the world who has implemented or is implementing it. According to the Transport Committee's report, it will cost £5 billion a year to run. It is based on new global positioning system technology, which is used voluntarily by Norwich Union customers. However, it is not used massively across the world and is not the traditional microwave number recognition tag and beacon system. There might be good reasons for using that system and the thinking might be that it will work extraordinarily well and that there will be no computer glitches. However, there are hitches. There are problems with synchronising what we are doing with what the European Union might want to do. There are privacy issues and issues related to who will own the satellites and what they will do with the information. I am not saying that those issues cannot be bottomed out, but they are complex. If I were the Minister, I would understandably want to learn more before going for the big-bang solution. Once we do that, it will be difficult to retreat. Like him, I would probably be encouraging pilots. The transport innovation fund perhaps involves some strong-arm tactics, but the Government are taking a carrot-and-stick approach to some extent. Word has gone out to local authorities that if they want to be splendidly rewarded by the Government, one thing they could do is pilot a measure of road charging. I can therefore quite see why the Government want to avoid a big-bang solution and wish to prepare the public, the motoring industry and the freight industry. As the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich said, the Government have not been helped by the collapse of the lorry charging system. I am a bit bemused by that. There are practical reasons agin it, some of which are in the Select Committee's report and some of which have been spelt out by Ministers. I wonder whether technical problems have been encountered that we might come across later if we opt for a massive scheme across the country. I reflect on the fact that Germany seems to have done something similar, although transport conditions and Government conditions are different in Germany. I wonder whether the Germans decided that there were serious technical problems of the sort that could well come back to bite us. Pilots have their place, but the cruel dilemma for the Government is that there are also arguments against them. It is often argued that pilots are unrepresentative because the procedure for charging people is not universal across counties, regions or countries, which results in all sorts of displacement effects that are not created if the scheme is nationwide. Some people would advance the different argument that if we keep setting up enough pilots, we may well resolve the real meat of the problem without having to opt for a fully fledged nationwide scheme. That was the line followed by the hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd). The evidence so far is not terribly helpful. We have the examples of London and the M6 toll road. One decreased traffic and the other slightly increased it. It is, however, very difficult to draw obvious conclusions from those examples, because we may not have to the same extent in Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds what we have in London. A city might have a whole range of options—an excellent bus service, many trains and an underground system—and the people who need those options the most are probably the people who cannot pay the charges. I speculate on the predicament of a cleaner in Manchester under a road charging scheme who must go to work when the building needs cleaning, which is often early in the morning, and return in whatever congestion period has been set. That person does not have a lot of cash and cannot vary their behaviour by choosing to drive at a different time. Buses might not be running at the appropriate time or in sufficient numbers, or they may simply be inconvenient. All those factors could create the problems of social exclusion that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich mentioned and that would affect ordinary city workers rather than people in the country. That point must be addressed in any scheme, and surely will be. People who have the opportunity to use the M6 toll road increasingly go via Birmingham. I am one of them, and I hope that I can give Department for Transport officials in the Chamber useful advice about what is actually happening. I used to avoid the M6 altogether. I would simply roll along in my car past the RAC building. It is a deeply unpleasant and tedious experience to be surrounded by large lorries.