| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
The Minister for Transport (Mrs. Helen Liddell): Airdrie and Shotts.
Mr. Gray: I beg the right hon. Lady's forgiveness for getting her constituency wrong. She is the personification of the West Lothian question. In the forthcoming reshuffle, the Prime Minister must address the question of why my constituents in North Wiltshire have a Scottish Member making a mess of their transport system--and my goodness, what a mess the Government are making of it.
Mrs. Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside): The hon. Gentleman is concentrating on personal and diversionary matters rather than on policy, because he has no policy.
Mr. Gray: I shall come to policy matters in a moment. My party has today published a policy paper that is full of interesting new ideas, so the hon. Lady is wrong. I should also correct her on one little point. I am not being the slightest bit personal. As I said, I have the highest respect for the Minister for Transport, and I am not being even slightly personal about her. She is in a constitutionally difficult position, because she is down here pontificating to my constituents in North Wiltshire.
Imagine if the Member of Parliament for North Wiltshire went to Edinburgh and said, "I want to come to the Holyrood Parliament and be the Minister for Transport in Scotland. I want to sort out transport in Scotland. I represent North Wiltshire and have nothing to do with Scotland, but I want to pontificate about transport in Scotland." What a fuss there would be from the Labour party if I even suggested that, but that is exactly what has happened the other way round.
The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) is correct to put me right, so perhaps I should move on to the more meaty substance of the White Paper and the Government's response to the Select Committee's report. Other hon. Members will have something to say about other aspects of transport policy, such as the railways, buses, aircraft and airports, where odd things have been happening recently. I want to concentrate my efforts and remarks on the subject of road transport, which the nation has been most interested in recently.
People have heard the warm words and seen the policy launches--the Green Papers, the White Papers, the Committees and the working parties. The Deputy Prime Minister said that he would sort out transport, but people sit fuming in traffic jams up and down the country. People have seen petrol prices go through the roof: they are now as high as those in any other nation in Europe. Road haulage businesses have gone bust, or have been driven offshore because they cannot afford to pay the vehicle excise duty on their 20-tonne lorries. The road transport system is in the doldrums and in the grip of congestion.
What is the Government's dramatic and interesting new solution to this problem? They propose a variety of taxing proposals: road charging, congestion charging, work place
charging, and the possibility of retail charging--which the Select Committee proposed, although the Government are not in favour of it, so there is a slight divide between them. How well would those charges work? What will happen if there is road pricing and road congestion charging?
Imagine that you are a company executive living in a large house in Surrey. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Riverside corrects my use of the word "you", which I am of course using hypothetically. Imagine that one is a fat cat living in a large mansion in Surrey with a large Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur.
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test):
Does the hon. Gentleman have sufficient memory banks to recall a Government Green Paper called "Transport: the way forward" published in 1996, which had a long section about road charging? It said that the then Government presumed in favour of road charging. Does he remember that, and does he wish to reflect on it?
Mr. Gray:
That has nothing whatever to do with my position. We have always been against extra taxation. In the paper that we published today, we have laid out--[Laughter.] Labour Members laugh, but it is a nervous laughter because they know that they are taxing the motorist off the road. We will not do that, and we are committed to reversing those taxes when we come back into power.
Never mind the party political points that the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) tries to make, let us consider for a moment the practicalities of road pricing and road charging. Let us return to our chief executive living in a mansion in Surrey.
Mr. Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield):
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Gray:
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I have given way quite a lot. [Interruption.] Oh, why not?
Mr. Burden:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, because it is important that he is aware of his party's policy. All politicians should be aware of their own party's policy. I remind him that the 1996 Green Paper said:
Mr. Gray:
The hon. Member for Southampton, Test made precisely the same intervention a moment ago. It is obviously No. 23 on the Labour Whips' list of suggested interventions. The answer is no, I do not agree. Today's policy paper made it perfectly plain that we do not agree, and my press release--which I mentioned earlier, in connection with the Select Committee report--made it plain that we do not agree. We are wholeheartedly opposed to congestion charging, to workplace charging and to retail charging. It is the Labour party that is wholeheartedly committed to taxing the motorist off the
Mrs. Liddell:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Gray:
I am pretty keen to get on, but of course I must give way to the right hon. Lady.
Mrs. Liddell:
The hon. Gentleman is developing his theme. Can he tell us how his party intends to make up the shortfall of £10 million that would be a consequence of the document that was published today?
Mr. Gray:
I am afraid that I have no intention of doing anything of the sort, for a very simple reason. What we are discussing is the report of the Transport Sub-Committee on an integrated transport policy, and the Government's response to it. That is the purpose of the debate. No doubt my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) will expand on the point, but it is no part of my business, as a Back Bencher, to do so.
All this party political banter is fine for those who are on the spot, as the Labour party is. I want to talk about some of the practicalities and details of road congestion, retail and workplace parking charging. It is quite interesting to note the way in which such measures will work. I was talking about a fat cat with a house in Surrey and a business in the City. At present--as the Minister for Transport suggests--he is having a terrible time: he cannot get into London because of congestion. So what does he want to do? He wants to tax congestion off the roads. That is not because he wants to get a train to the City; he wants to get rid of all those dreadful plebs.
So what are the Government going to do? They are going to do what the Greater London Authority Bill proposes and levy a £5-a-day congestion charge on those who wish to come into the centre of London. The chief executive of a bank in the City may be quite happy to pay £5 a day to be sure that the roads are clear; to a two-Jags fat cat, £5 a day is nothing. However, the Government are talking about the possibility of a workplace charge of £1,000 a year. Again, to the chairman of a bank in the City £1,000 would be small beer. He would pay far more than that to National Car Parks--£2,000 or £3,000 a year. A first-class ticket from Surrey would cost £4,000 or £5,000 a year, so £1,000 a year is nothing at all. But, my goodness--it would matter to one of my rural constituents, who has to drive an F-registered car to his or her workplace in Chippenham, if he or she had to pay £5 a day to get into Chippenham and £1,000 a year in work place charges. The Minister and other Labour Members, who spend all their time talking about London, the suburbs and the middle classes are not thinking about the people on whom the charges will bear down so heavily. The poor, the low-waged, the rural dwellers and the disabled--those are the people whom the Labour party has cast out in its drive towards new Labour policy.
Mr. Brake:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Those are the people on whom workplace and congestion charges would bear down particularly heavily.
"The Government will shortly be starting trials to explore whether it is technologically feasible to introduce electronic tolling on motorways. If these trials are successful, new opportunities will become available for shifting the emphasis of the costs of providing the motorway away from fixed towards marginal charges".
The paper goes on to refer to experiments with road charging, with the presumption in favour of legislation. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with that, or does he not?
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |