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Road Pricing

: The 30 or so interested councils present many opportunities, including that of testing behaviour. I would go further and say that there is no point in running a pilot unless we learn something from it. I would also argue that there is no point in running more than one pilot to answer the same question. If we are to learn anything from pilots, we need to identify questions and try to answer them. That might mean that we have one pilot dealing with one subject and another with another. Some pilots might be relatively simple, and able to be started quickly; others more complicated, needing to be run in the medium term; and others might be even longer term. All of them, as has been said by several speakers, have to be run in such a way that they can operate together and can all be part of the final picture. That means that technological and social issues will all have to be brought into line. I hope that we will be able to answer some of the inter-urban issues with pilots but, because we are shortly to announce who is to work with us in the short term, I must make one point crystal clear: nobody has made any decisions about pilots or road pricing in those areas. All that we are committed to considering is the problems of those areas and the potential for working with them further. I do not want anybody to hear the announcement that a certain area has been included in the pilots and to run into the street screaming, ““Oh my goodness, we are getting road pricing in our area.”” That is not what we are about. We are aiming to identify issues of interest on which we can work together, to look at them in depth and then to decide whether to take the next step.