| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Jenkin: We tabled amendments in Committee for such exemptions, but none of our amendments was accepted.
Sir Brian Mawhinney: I should have known that and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for telling me. The Government mouth support for the old and the disabled, but they are not prepared to make legislative provision for them. Perhaps that is because they understand that the administrative costs of exemptions would be enormous. What about occasional visitors to a town or city? How would they be dealt with?
If the Government are interested in electronic technology, they must tell us who would pay for the installation of all the electronic equipment in every car, van, bus, truck and, for all I know, motorcycle in the land. Would the Government pay? Would people be able to reclaim the money? Would they be able to offset it against tax? The Government have no idea.
The Minister looks at me quizzically. He is beginning to understand that when he talks about congestion charging and tries to encourage some of his more gullible party members in other parts of the country to introduce it locally, he does not begin to realise the ramifications.
Mr. Raynsford: I would not want the right hon. Gentleman to labour under any illusions. I remind him that the basis of the scheme is that the issues that he has raised are to be determined locally. He might remember the time when he was Secretary of State for Transport. The Government at that time appeared to be rather interested in the scheme. Why has he done an about-turn since he left office?
Sir Brian Mawhinney: I am deeply grateful to the Minister; I was hoping that he would get up and say that. In preparation for his doing so, I went to the Library today to re-read my evidence to the Select Committee on congestion charging in London on 1 February 1995. The Minister did not even know that I gave evidence. He has no idea what that evidence was. The Under-Secretary knows, because he questioned me. The Minister could have saved himself a good deal of embarrassment if he had asked his hon. Friend before he got up to ask that question.
His hon. Friend, or the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich, could have told him that the hon. Lady--with all the courtesy with which she is traditionally
associated--managed to convey to the Committee that this Secretary of State was pretty unimpressed with charging. He did not say that it would not be Government policy, because he repeatedly said that the research was not in and that he would not make a judgment until he had all the information. I know that the hon. Lady remembers that, because we talked about this issue a few weeks ago and she went off and read the evidence. The Minister knows nothing about it. The Under-Secretary does, and he will not take me to task when he winds up.The Minister's second point was that all this is to be dealt with locally. Let every local authority leader in the country understand that before they get into congestion charging, these are the questions that must be asked and answered. There is no point in turning to the Government, because the Government are all mouth on this issue and do not begin to understand the ramifications of their policy.
Mr. Raynsford: Does the right hon. Gentleman accept the principle of collective responsibility? Will he remind the House whether he remained a member of the Government at a time--admittedly after he personally had ceased to be Secretary of State for Transport--when the Government issued a Green Paper suggesting that congestion charging was the right way forward? Did the right hon. Gentleman resign because of that?
Sir Brian Mawhinney: No; he talked to his right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young), the then Secretary of State, and he agreed a statement in the Green Paper that bears no resemblance to what the Minister has just asked. The difficulty that the Minister has is that I know what happened and what my view was. I know what my right hon. Friend's view was. I know what was in the Green Paper, and it was not the view that the Minister would have the House believe.
I remind the Minister that it was a Green Paper; it was a judgment, taken collectively, that following the transport debate that I initiated there were still a number of outstanding issues to be resolved--certainly on this matter--before the Government could even make a decision. That is what a Green Paper is all about and the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich will recall that that is what I told her when I gave evidence on 1 February 1995.
Mr. Clive Efford (Eltham): I will avoid the temptation to remind the right hon. Gentleman of the cuts that he made in the road-building programme and the red route programme in London while he was Secretary of State. Would he care to comment on the actual wording of the Conservative Green Paper, published in 1996? It said:
- The Government will discuss with the Local Authority Associations what powers may be appropriate over and above those already available to them, for example to facilitate the introduction of congestion charging, area licensing, or taxing private non-residential parking.
What advice would the Minister give to those in the public and social services? Who will pay the congestion charges for school buses, district nurses or police vehicles? The list goes on and on. Does the Minister think that the charges should be levied by location, by distance travelled or by time spent? None of this is a matter of interest to the Government, because they do not care. They just want to find new ways to raise taxes.
The Government are in favour of this ill-thought-through policy. It will be a damaging policy competitively, and it will reinforce in the minds of my constituents the fact that the Government hate the motorist. That is the ineluctable consequence drawn from the policy. I will also tell my constituents that the Deputy Prime Minister did not have the guts to be here to answer for himself.
8.37 pm
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich): The first thing to remember when trying to plan a transport policy for the United Kingdom is that when people are in their cars, they want everything cleared away so that they can go past; that when they are fighting to get on a train, they want much better public transport; and that when they are walking by the road, they want to be safe and not at risk from any vehicle. I regard that as a perfectly normal and balanced view, even if it means that we occasionally have slightly unrealistic debates.
I do remember the passages of arms that I had with the right hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Sir B. Mawhinney) when he was Secretary of State for Transport. I also remember him giving hell to people who he felt had not supported him correctly after one of those sessions. I am also prepared to believe that he was exceedingly sceptical about congestion charging; however, his Government were not, and subsequent Conservative Ministers not only planned to bring forward congestion charging in some form but in the run-up to the general election had actually begun to prepare for it.
The right hon. Gentleman said that it is difficult--almost impossible--to introduce congestion charging to deal with the amount of traffic on the road, but he knows that that is not true. Other countries have done it. Norway has a very effective congestion charging scheme. The Select Committee, to which he referred, which had a Conservative Chairman at the time, went to have a look at it. We saw that there were several different ways of implementing congestion charging.
The right hon. Gentleman made an important point about the protection of privacy and ensuring that one does not impinge on the rights of people travelling in a vehicle whose number is recorded. The Norwegian authorities addressed that with great care. Their scheme was highly efficient and they recorded the number plates of vehicles going through congestion charging barriers, but they were also very careful to eliminate the faces of both driver and passengers, so that whoever was operating the system could not see them. The authorities had the number and could take action against the car that had breached the rules, but people's privacy was protected. The Norwegians had thought carefully about all the objections that the right hon. Gentleman raised.
We know that congestion charging can be implemented efficiently and at very little cost. British firms were responsible for the electronic charging systems used in America. A British firm came up with the smartcard technology used in Virginia, and a British firm has been carefully selling systems throughout the world.
There is no great technical problem to overcome. The real problem is political, which is why it is absolutely essential that local authorities should take the decisions. Authorities with mediaeval towns which are very attractive but have congested streets and are hard to get in and out of will want to consider seriously some form of charging as a way of at least slowing the rate of growth. Others that are perfectly capable of absorbing large numbers of vehicles, either by using park and ride or by providing alternative forms of transport, will be quite happy to let the natural evolution of the motor car develop in a different way. Congestion charging is achievable as one of the means of managing the growth of motor traffic. That is all it is: a management tool.
What has been demonstrated today is that we have to think seriously about transport, and in terms other than, "Yah-boo, you rotten lot hate the motor car, and we love the bicycle", or, "We managed to get rid of the railway system, so it is not costing as much, but you want to run it down even further." Frankly, that is not a very high level of debate, and it does not do anybody much good.
Rail privatisation was an unmitigated disaster. Only now, years after the destruction and the splitting of an old system into unmanageable fragments, are we beginning to pull it together into some kind of manageable, efficient system. It still suffers disastrously from the way in which it was privatised. The Conservative Chairman of a Conservative-dominated Select Committee thought that the method being used by the Conservative Government to privatise the railways was a disaster. He set out the way in which he thought that it should be done. He was not against privatisation, but was convinced that what was being suggested was unworkable. He proved to be absolutely right.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |