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Road Users (Taxes and Charges)

Well, I was shocked. Indeed, I asked the Secretary of State whether he thought that our constituents up and down the country would be shocked by his admission. He said that he did not think so, because this was the responsibility of local authorities. Given that response, I went to the Table Office and tabled a question to the Department for Communities and Local Government, in which I asked what that Department's central estimate was of the cost of the potholes around the country. The reply was that this was a matter not for the DCLG but for the Department for Transport. A few days later, I got a written response to the same question from the Minister of State, Department for Transport, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Mr. Khan), telling me that his Department had no central estimate of those costs. Most people up and down the country will be shocked that neither the Department for Transport nor the Department for Communities and Local Government has a central estimate of the cost to this country of the pothole damage on our road network. Thankfully, however, we have the Local Government Association, which has provided a figure of £100 million. That is the best evidence that I have seen of the cost to our country of the pothole damage. That £100 million sounds like an awful lot of money, and indeed it is. When it is compared with the Select Committee's estimate of the £48.1 billion raised from taxes and charges on motorists, however, it is a very small number indeed. I would have thought, given the winter we have just experienced, that there is a perfectly reasonable case for some of that £48.1 billion—perhaps £100 million of it—to be put into our road network to get the pothole situation sorted out. Another issue is the number of people using our roads. I very much sympathise with the view put forward by the hon. Member for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby) that if we build more roads, we will end up with more road users. I absolutely understand that and sympathise with that view, but this country faces a very real problem with the number of people living here. Estimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest that our population is going to increase from 61 million today to 70 million by 2029—and there is nothing we can do to prevent that from happening. If net immigration continues at its present rate of about 160,000 net immigrants a year, our population will go above 70 million. I believe I am right in saying that the Department for Transport's central estimate of the number of vehicles on our roads is that it is going to increase by one third by 2025. Although I am hugely sympathetic to the argument that we should not build more roads because we will end up with more road users, I contend that we are actually going to need more road space, because unless we do, our country is simply going to come to a halt. This is particularly important in areas such as Kettering because under the Government's house building programme, the number of houses in my constituency is set to go up by one third by 2021. The A14 around Kettering and other nearby roads will simply come to a standstill unless more road space is constructed. I am afraid that we are going to have to tackle the issue of needing more roads.