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Road Users (Taxes and Charges)

The hon. Gentleman is right. The question put on the Downing street website was very simplistic and, indeed, misleading one, but it is also true that the public response was so strong that it seems to have produced the reaction of the Government stating that they would not proceed further with plans for road charging. Our Committee felt that the Government should be much clearer about what they intend to do about road charging, if they look at all the aspects that we identified in our sixth report and previous ones. Looking at local congestion charges, decided on locally by local authorities, the decisive rejection of the Manchester congestion charge scheme, which was part of a much broader scheme involving massive investment in public transport in the Greater Manchester area, seems to have deterred local authorities from introducing their own scheme. London may well continue to be the only major city with a significant congestion charge, but although the scheme operated in central London has made that a more pleasant place to be by reducing the number of vehicles entering the central zone, it is worrying that the costs of the scheme account for almost 50 per cent. of its revenue. The costs of implementation would have to be borne in mind by any other local authority considering introducing a scheme of its own. One way forward might be to consider voluntary pricing schemes, such as the one trialled in Oregon in the USA, where motorists could agree voluntarily to move from paying road taxation to paying according to how much they travelled, with access to entertainment, information and other services linked to participation in the scheme. Perhaps the Government or other organisations could consider that way forward. The transport innovation fund was introduced by the Government as an important way to deal with congestion and, in its other strand, to improve productivity, but one of the problems in the fund's congestion strand was the requirement on a local authority to impose a congestion charge before it could access the fund. Our Committee stated that we wanted the funds made available for public transport through the TIF to remain available—indeed, we were worried that because of non-take-up of that fund, the money would go back to the Treasury, which we certainly did not want to happen—but we wanted the Government to change the rules, so that local authorities could use the scheme to reduce congestion and to bring innovative new ideas into play without being forced to impose a congestion charge scheme. The Government have responded, albeit perhaps a little belatedly—in the past couple of weeks, in fact—by announcing that they will now phase out the TIF and replace it with a much broader urban challenge fund, which would be implemented after the next comprehensive spending review and which would not require local authorities to impose a congestion charge to access the funds available. We do not yet know the full details of that fund or exactly how it would operate, but it looks very promising.