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Road Pricing

: The hon. Gentleman is right. We can learn from other places, and we are studying schemes around the world. However, many of them do not deal with the sorts of problems that we are trying to address. For instance, some hon. Members have spoken in this debate as though the congestion charging that applies in central London is the sort of road pricing scheme that we are talking about for the rest of the country. The zonal congestion charge in central London, which uses relatively unsophisticated technology, is not applicable to the wider national situation. It might apply to certain towns and areas, and if it does then we might consider it. However, we are talking about ending up with a distance-based road price that will have to vary according to the congestion of the road and the time of day. That is a different concept from a congestion zone. When we consider a foreign scheme, we have to ask whether the problems that it was designed to solve are the problems that we are trying to solve here. If they were, then we will take it on board and will study it closely. Let me outline some of the technologies that have been suggested. Not only Governments have looked at some of these technologies; a number of insurance companies are interested in moving how they charge for insurance to a road pricing system. One, Norwich Union, has a far advanced pilot scheme under way, in which people use what is basically a GPS positioning system to identify how many miles they have driven and are charged for their insurance accordingly. There is a tendency for some people to say, ““Okay, all the problems have been solved. All the technology we need is there; we can just apply it to our national road pricing scheme.”” However, the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire talked about the need to make sure that technologies work properly. The GPS system that Norwich Union are using is very good for answering the questions that the company wants to ask: ““When are you driving your vehicle?””, ““Broadly, where are you driving it?”” and ““How far are you driving it?”” Younger, inexperienced drivers pay a great deal for insurance because they could be out and about on the roads at all hours and we know that many such drivers have accidents between midnight and 4 o'clock in the morning because they are tired, have been partying or are with their friends and showing off. If we want to come up with a system that disincentivises them from driving at that time of night, we need to deploy technology that tells us whether they are on the road at that time of night. That question is different from the one we are trying to answer; if we go to national road pricing, we may need far more specific and accurate information. For example, one of the things that Transport for London has identified is that there is an effect called canyoning when a person is driving in cities. That means that the person is screened from the satellite by the tall buildings on either side and that the GPS system does not work that well in cities. That would be entirely unacceptable for a road pricing system such as the one we are considering. Where do we go from there? Well, the Austrians or Germans have built some sort of gyroscopic system into their technology so that when the GPS system is not working, there is a way of predicting how far a person is travelling. Others have proposed a predictive mapping system whereby cars have an electronic map inside them and a person can work out where they are on that map using the GPS signal. I hope that the House is starting to get the flavour of the fact that this is a complicated thing and that it does not necessarily have the accuracy that we seek. Different types of GPS technology can be put in vehicles to make the system more accurate. When we manage to get Galileo deployed, we will also have to ask ourselves whether that will increase the accuracy of GPS systems. GPS, of course, is just one technology that we might use. Mobile phone-based technologies are being piloted.