Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400-419)
DR DENVIL
COOMBE, PROFESSOR
PETER MACKIE,
DR GREGORY
MARSDEN AND
DR DAVID
METZ
26 JANUARY 2005
Q400 Mr Stringer: Is that not a good
in its own right?
Dr Coombe: Yes. The question is
where do you get the money from to do that if you do not have
some revenue stream like you would get from congestion charging.
Q401 Mr Stringer: The assumption in your
answer is regulating buses in the metropolitan areas outside of
London would have a cost attached to it?
Dr Coombe: It would. The operators
run the commercially viable network. If you want to change that,
you are very likely to require subsidy.
Q402 Mr Stringer: Even though, prior
to the Mayor of London taking over regulated buses in London,
effectively run at very little subsidy?
Dr Coombe: London is special.
An awful lot of people want to move around in London. The road
system is very inadequate in London and it is very congested.
These are conditions at the far end of the spectrum. This is not
the case in other places where the car is much easier to use.
Q403 Clive Efford: Dr Coombe, you said
you would favour inter-urban road charging. Did I understand you
correctly?
Dr Coombe: As a way in. That was
the question: where do we start?
Q404 Clive Efford: The question was what
of the surrounding network and the displacement. You did say in
answer to a later question about the M6 that you would have charged
for the surrounding road network with a lesser charge. Would you
apply a similar approach to an inter-urban charging system?
Dr Coombe: My way in is through
linking charging to improved roads so that you can introduce what
I call a modest level of charge in association with widening.
The modest level of charge is designed not to increase traffic
on the local road system. It does not decant. It is a way of getting
people used to paying for use of the road system. It is only a
start and it is certainly not the end point. That, coupled with
congestion charging, will just alter the climate and enable the
political process to get its weight behind developing more comprehensive
systems.
Q405 Clive Efford: What about the overall
impact? If, for instance, the alternatives to using a car are
not available on an already over-congested public transport system,
what impact will road charging have on people's ability to travel
and people on low incomes who do not have any alternative to participate
or keep travelling to work?
Dr Coombe: I agree with Dr Metz.
The Achilles heel of road pricing is how to compensate the low
income car owner, who will continue to use the road system and
pay the charges. Taken as a whole, continuing car users will probably
lose. They will gain less through relief of congestion than they
would pay. Within that spectrum, there will be winners and losers.
The business people and people on high incomes will have a net
gain and the people at the bottom end of the spectrum will not.
Because they are continuing to use the road system, they are the
people who would find it very difficult to make their journeys
using public transport and they are therefore the people who are
very difficult to compensate in any way at all. It is one of the
things I pointed out a few years ago. That is a prime area for
big research.
Q406 Clive Efford: What form of technology
would you suggest to be used for a road pricing scheme, a tag
and beacon scheme or any other form?
Dr Coombe: I think the ultimate
is a distance based charge using GPS technology like the Norwich
Union scheme. To implement that nationally is a big effort so
one would have to go for smaller implementation using whatever
technology is around. The London scheme has demonstrated what
you can do with the available technology.
Q407 Clive Efford: Has not the London
scheme put a block on other cities moving towards congestion charging
in the sense that, if you cannot raise the sort of money that
we were anticipating originally in London, how are other cities
going to make it pay for itself?
Dr Coombe: I have not heard that
argument. That is not the prime argument that one hears against
implementing congestion charging and of course it is not the only
way of doing it.
Q408 Clive Efford: It is certainly not
the only way of doing it but it is true to say that London has
not raised the sort of money that was originally talked about
when the scheme was introduced.
Dr Coombe: Derek Turner will be
able to give you better information on that than I.
Q409 Clive Efford: Has there been a problem
with the technology in the Norwich Union scheme in terms of coverage?
Dr Coombe: It is a very small
scheme.
Dr Marsden: No. They have yet
to find anywhere on the road network in the UK through their trials
where they have not been able to get enough coverage points on
the roads to work out which road people were on. There may be
sections of roads—they have done trials in the middle of
London—where they do not get a signal but they get enough
signals from along that route to be able to pick up where that
vehicle is. They have done quite extensive trials. Clearly, it
is a commercial product so they would not be rolling this out
commercially if they did not feel they could get an accurate enough
picture back.
Q410 Clive Efford: You would say that
the technology has reached a stage now where we could begin to
roll out a national road charging scheme?
Dr Marsden: It is a pilot of 5,000
cars at the moment but it is 5,000 cars today and I do not really
see that we would have to wait ten years before that could become
far more mainstream. I am sure it will become far more mainstream
as an insurance based product in that time period. Whilst I accept
that setting up a national billing infrastructure and some of
the enforcement issues might be considerably more complex for
a national road user charging scheme, the ability of that technology
to prove itself over a period of less than ten years is almost
certain.
Q411 Mr Donaldson: Would an alternative
tolled motorway network in the UK be a welcome development?
Professor Mackie: No, particularly
if it was private sector. I would like to align myself with what
Dr Coombe said a few moments ago. The M6 toll was a policy mistake
for a number of reasons. One is that if you give away a 53 year
unregulated franchise you lose control over what you can do with
that bit of the network. You may need to reacquire that control
subsequently if you are interested in a national scheme. Is there
not a nightmare scenario in which the government works towards
the creation of a national road user charging scheme by various
little bits of franchising up and down the country, to different
multinational companies; some local authority schemes with different
local authorities, and the problem of bringing them all together
in an integrated way into a national scheme becomes impossible?
We already have a situation in Italy and Spain where you have
many different toll motorway operators. Trying to achieve interoperability
and consistency between the different operators is an extremely
difficult thing to do. Quite apart from the questions which Denvil
has raised about efficiency and locking the benefits in and so
on, I think there are also issues about public control over what
is a very precious, valuable, scarce resource, ensuring that we
have a viable way forward. I would like to agree with Mrs Ellman
that the question of how we get from here to there is the $64,000
question in this inquiry. The private toll motorway route is,
in my view, not the correct answer.
Q412 Mr Donaldson: Dr Coombe, in your
written evidence you predicted that traffic levels on the M6 corridor
would increase if the M6 Expressway is built and you expanded
on that theory earlier. Is there any benefit in the construction
of an expressway of that nature?
Dr Coombe: It would have economic
benefits, yes. It will provide shorter journey terms, in the short
term. Even if traffic levels returned to the point where congestion
was much the same, you would still have more people travelling
and therefore there would be some benefit attached to it. That
misses the point. We are supposed to be developing a sustainable
transport system. That word has many meanings but one of them
is that you have some control. The authority, the government at
whatever tier, can exercise some control over the way in which
the public facility is used. That is why I was arguing for some
kind of comprehensive charging across the existing as well as
the new roads.
Q413 Mr Donaldson: Finally, do you think
that the M6 toll road has had the anticipated impact and have
drivers responded as you would have expected?
Dr Coombe: The cars appear to
have.
Q414 Mr Donaldson: What about the drivers?
Dr Coombe: I have no knowledge.
The goods vehicle usage seems to be low. The goods vehicles do
not seem to have changed by much on the existing road network.
They seem to be less attracted by it. As expected, the signs are
there that traffic is beginning to rise again more than at the
natural rate of growth on the relieved roads. That is the danger.
Q415 Mrs Ellman: Professor Mackie, I
take the point you make about the problem of the private sector
setting charges but are you implying that there should be just
one authority that sets the charges for the whole country, although
the charge might vary in different parts?
Professor Mackie: I might take
issue with the words "one authority". I believe that
there should be a comprehensive approach to the pricing of road
use. I would like to think in terms of some kind of tariff in
which fuel duty and vehicle excise duty probably remain as elements
but with additional elements added on top of them. There are complex
issues about who gets the revenue and how the revenue is split
between the Highways Agency and your government, the divvying
up of the revenue within any such scheme. I do not have a settled
answer to exactly how to do it, but from the user point of view
we ought to be working towards a single, seamless interoperable
system with single billing, in which it is like the British Telecom
tariff or some system such as that, with the question of what
Leeds and Liverpool get dealt with in a different part of the
system.
Q416 Mrs Ellman: Are you saying it should
be a national decision about how all this would work?
Professor Mackie: Yes. I believe
that fundamentally Breaking the logjam,[1]
which relied on local authorities to make the running and do the
business, was perhaps an acceptable try at a way into the forest
but fundamentally, ultimately, it will come down to your government
to make the running at national level if we are to get from half
a per cent of vehicle kilometres being charged to a more sensible
number such as 30, 40 or 50.
Q417 Mrs Ellman: If a national lead was
taken, are you within that ruling out local authorities' schemes?
Do you think there should be any such thing?
Professor Mackie: I do not know.
Q418 Chairman: There are very few people
who say that to us. I would like to ask about Dr Metz's point
which I think is very valid. Can you manage by discriminatory
tariff to protect those who have to use wheel transport whether
they like it or not, because they will have the oldest, most tatty
cars anyway?
Dr Metz: We can learn perhaps
from other parts of the transport sector—for example, the
budget airlines. If you travel by a budget airline, you know that
everyone on that flight is paying a different fare. The general
rule is the earlier you book the less you pay. A similar thing
happens on the railways. If I book to go to, say, Birmingham a
week today, I can pay the full second class fare of £33 or
if I pay today and use a saver card I can pay less than £10.
The airlines and the railways do this for commercial reasons.
They want to get people to travel. What this system means is that
people with low incomes can take advantage of the low fares that
are on offer in advance. This is what economists call discriminatory
pricing and it is distinct from market clearing pricing, which
is where everyone pays the same price. It is market clearing pricing
which has been the whole focus of the tariff structure for road
pricing. The idea of road pricing is the charge may vary according
to the time of day, the day of the week, section of the road,
class of the vehicle, but every vehicle of the same class will
pay the same charge regardless of the ability of the driver to
afford it. My suggestion is that we should enlarge the scope of
our thinking about road pricing to include discriminatory pricing.
In other words, the pricing that recognises that people have different
affordabilities. The way the budget airlines and the railways
work is there is a trade-off between time and money. We all have
the same amount of time but we have different amounts of money
so our trade-offs are different. If we do not have much money,
we are willing to sacrifice convenience in timetables by committing
ourselves to a particular train or plane.
Q419 Chairman: You made the very point
yourself that people tend to accept something like tolling even
though they cannot really afford it because they have to get to
a particular job at a particular time. Is it not a contradiction
in terms to say they can use the same facilities but as long as
it is four o'clock in the morning when the job starts at seven?
Dr Metz: No. If they book ahead
and commit themselves ahead to using a particular bit of road
at a particular time, they will get a better fare.
Dr Coombe: We have not talked
so far about what you do with the revenues. There will be very
substantial revenues with a properly designed pricing system.
One of the points that is often made is that the important thing
is that you recycle these revenues in an economically beneficial
way. Then you get this upward spiral of economic benefit which
derives from road pricing. One of the things to think about in
that general theme is how to spend the money such that the low
income people do not need to travel substantial distances in order
to find work. In other words, you feed the money back into regeneration
schemes which provide local work. One of the phenomena we came
across in Yorkshire was the substantial distances that people
were travelling simply because there was not work for them locally.
It was always seen as a criticism of any road pricing scheme that
we would be penalising these people. The answer is to generate
the jobs through investment of the net revenues.
1 Department of the Environment, Transport and the
Regions Breaking the logjam: government response 22 February
2000 (http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft-roads/documents/page/dft-roads-503871.hcsp) Back
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