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Severn Crossings Toll

Everyone seems to be leaving the Chamber, which is sad because very few issues cause more rows in pubs and constituency surgeries in south Wales than the Severn bridge. You might expect me to declare an interest at this point, Mr Davies, but one of the bits of pub trivia that came out of our inquiry is that I do not need to do so, because neither of the Severn bridges starts or ends in my constituency. One ends in the constituency of Newport East, and the old Severn bridge starts and ends entirely in England before joining the Wye bridge. It would, therefore, be difficult for some of the Members who have left the Chamber to demand that the old Severn bridge be partly administered by the Welsh Assembly Government in Wales, because it does not actually come into Wales at all. The issue for all of us is the price. It has confounded us in constituency surgeries throughout south Wales and the M4 corridor. It is worth setting out some of the background. The second Severn crossing was built by a consortium of four companies, which became Severn River Crossing. Not only did they build the second Severn crossing, but they took on the debt of the old bridge, which amounted to about £450 million. The deal was that they could collect just under £1 billion, which was linked to inflation, and that, once that money had been collected, the bridge would revert to public ownership. At present, that is expected to happen in around 2017. It became clear to us during the course of our inquiry that, no matter how angry we might get over the level of the tolls and no matter what impact we might think it has on the economy, there is very little that any of us, including the Minister, can do about it. This is a matter not of the Minister deciding what he wants to set the toll at for any given year, but of straightforward contract law that would be backed up by the courts. The deal was struck in 1992 between the then Government and private companies, and there is no flexibility in it whatsoever.