Road pricing is essential for sustainable transport
Last year, the OBR said of the Government’s policy on electric vehicles that it is “rapidly eroding the £39 billion a year revenue from petrol and diesel taxes.” The House of Commons Transport Select Committee produced a unanimous report in the Parliament that has just ended, saying that work on road pricing should start “straightaway”.
But when I asked a treasury minister in April what they were doing in response to these two reports, the answer was “The Government have no plans to consider road pricing.” They may have been scarred by the Uxbridge by-election where the extension of London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to outer London boroughs was a major issue. (A policy which produced some losers and no winners.)
We now have a new Government, and I hope they will look at the issue afresh.
We read almost every day of the tough decisions the government is having to take to balance the books on current expenditure, and the last thing they need is the prospect of gradually losing £35 billion a year. If they do nothing to take road pricing forward, travelling by car will become relatively cheap, compared to public transport – precisely the opposite of what is needed to have a sustainable long-term transport policy. And other taxes will have to rise to make up the loss. Not a good result.
When I was transport secretary in the 1990’s I was interested in road pricing and was in the process of working with the Transport Road Research Laboratory to see if it was feasible to charge 1p per mile on motorways. That work was abandoned by the incoming Labour government, who looked at road pricing later on, but backed off when confronted by a vocal pro-motoring lobby.
Back in the 1990’s the electric car revolution was at least a decade away. There was no congestion charge – a form of road pricing – and crucially, telematics was not advanced as it now is, with the ability to track car movements. It is now a much more practical proposition than it was.
What has always frightened off the politicians has been the power of the motoring lobby. But public opinion is now in favour of road pricing. An Opinion Poll carried out by Opinium of 3000 people found that more people supported road pricing (38%) than opposed it (26%).
The case for road pricing is simple. Road space is a finite resource, so we should make the best use of it. (No government is going to expand road building to eliminate congestion.) If the road is free to everyone at all times, we get congestion. Road pricing evens out demand, encouraging some drivers to use the roads when they are less congested, and promoting public transport as an alternative. Congestion charging is a form of road pricing, but less effective as, once you are in the zone, you can drive as much as you want without further cost. Nor does the congestion charge vary within its set hours.
Differential pricing is now used in other transport modes – rail travel, air travel, cruises; and for utilities such as energy. Why not for car transport?
Central to getting public support is a clear statement that road pricing is aimed at generating the same amount of revenue as the taxes it replaces. It should not be seen as a way of getting more money from the motorists. To minimise the impact on those on low incomes for whom motor transport is essential for work or other reasons, everyone could have a free quota of miles before road pricing kicks in.
I hope the new transport ministers will approach this issue with an open mind, perhaps publishing a Green Paper to make the case and to generate a public debate. The argument in favour is there for the winning.
Lord Young of Cookham is a British Conservative Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 1974 to 2015 and as Secretary of State for Transport, Leader of the House of Commons, and Lord Privy Seal.
