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Road Pricing

: The hon. Gentleman is right and we must keep that possibility in mind. As we conduct the pilots, we may identify the ability to solve some local problems, and that may deal with the issue sufficiently well to enable us to slow down the progress towards national road pricing, or to decide that we will never need it. On the basis of our projections—I shall come to his point about projections shortly—the Government expect the increase in traffic in the next few years, and the increased congestion that that will cause, to require us seriously to consider the possibility that 10 years from now we will need a national road pricing system for all roads to change people's behaviour. That is our current conjecture. If it proves to be wrong and we do not need a national road pricing scheme, I have no doubt that we can slow down our progress towards it. That is one reason that it is important that we grope slowly towards such a scheme, using pilots to answer questions, using discussion and trying to establish consensus each step of the way, so that we can be open-minded about where it is necessary for us to go in the long term, but we need the scheme to be a clear possibility. The hon. Gentleman asked about our figures and whether our modelling is based only on vehicle numbers, or whether we took other factors into account. We take into account a wide range of factors, such as economic growth, demographics, the age distribution of the population and predictions about people's behaviour. When making any long-term projection, we are somewhat in the area of futurology, so we have to make some simplifying assumptions to come up with any answers at all, but we try to take a range of factors into account. If he wants to consider them in detail, they are on the Department for Transport website for all to see. If he has any questions about them, I shall do my best to clarify the matter for him. On the question asked by the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings about technology and how much the bit that will go into people's cars will cost, I do not have an answer. I am pretty sure that I do not want the Government to be in the business of designing it. As I have said many times in public, I suspect that if the Government designed it, it would probably be the size of a suitcase and cost several thousand pounds. It would be much better if we identified the standards—what information cars will need to exchange with the road pricing system—so that the private sector can become involved in designing the systems and building in added value. If and when we have a system of national road pricing, an obvious benefit would be to build the technology alongside satellite navigation, which is increasingly installed in cars as standard, so that the additional cost of providing the required information to the road pricing system might be negligible. People might want to ask not only, ““How do I get from A to B?”” or ““What is the quickest route from A to B?””, but ““What is the cheapest route from A to B?”” They might also want a system that provides them with route-planning advice such as, ““You can do this journey most quickly if you do it at this time of day.”” The private sector would be well equipped to build that added value into the system if one were prepared to pay for it. Therefore, the Government should try to come up with standards that we can publish, which other people can then make equipment for. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings asked about privacy, which is an important point. When the Secretary of State first announced what we were considering, there were all sorts of comments about the spy in the sky knowing where people are all the time. That is absolute nonsense and technological buffoonery. The spy in the sky is not a spy; the satellite does not know where people are. All that a positioning satellite does is to beam a signal that anyone in the world can pick up at any time, which tells the receiver the position and identity of the satellite and when it was beamed. Based on the satellite signals that the car receives, the equipment in the car carries out a process rather like triangulation to work out where the car is. Therefore, the equipment in the car knows where someone is, but the satellite and the Government do not. Of course, if we specified that someone's car must broadcast that information to us, we would know where they were, but we do not have to specify such a system. We could specify that the car must simply broadcast how much someone owes, how far they have travelled, what time of day they have travelled or the price of the road on which they have travelled. In those circumstances, it would not be necessary for the car automatically to broadcast information about its location. We can therefore deal with the privacy issues, and people should insist that we do so. However, they should not get hung up on the notion that such issues are a showstopper, because we can design a system that does not require that information. Several hon. Members have mentioned cost and social exclusion. On cost, we have made it clear that we do not intend the system to be revenue raising at this point. We are looking at shifting from the existing way in which motorists contribute to the Exchequer to new ways; we are not looking at the issue as a way of raising additional revenue. I take issue with what the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire said about the previous Government's 1996 White Paper, which did not deal with road pricing in quite the way that he suggested. In fact, it suggested looking into several possible ways of paying for roads and talked about the possibility of raising additional revenue, rather than the road pricing system that we are debating.