Examination of Witnesses (Questions 740-759)
RT HON
ALISTAIR DARLING
MP, MR FRANK
KELLY AND
MR DAVID
LAMBERTI
2 FEBRUARY 2005
Q740 Mrs Ellman: In what
sort of area would you like to pilot this? Would you be looking
at cities or regions?
Mr Darling: It
would probably be larger than a single city. London is separate.
I think the London scheme, especially as you have a willing partner
there, is different. Just in case anyone in London reading this
transcript gets the wrong idea, we would consider it; I am not
agreeing to it here and now. For example, in relation to Greater
Manchester, where, as you know, there has been something of a
controversy about the Metrolink scheme, when I wrote to Manchester
on 16 December last year I made the point that Manchester, which
has quite a highly developed public transport scheme as part of
big conurbation involving quite a lot of councils, with heavy
rail, light rail and buses and so on, has an excellent opportunity
to come forward with proposals to improve their public transport
generally. Whether or not they include road pricing in that is
a matter for them. In terms of magnitude, you would want to look
at a sufficiently large area to have an effect. As I say, we have
had had more expressions of interest than we thought we would.
I am not ruling anybody out at all, but I think if you were going
to do this, you would want to look at areas where you could get
some advantage from it.
Q741 Chairman: Is congestion
the worst problem that we face?
Mr Darling: I suppose it is one
of many. Congestion is a convenient way of summing up a whole
lot of problems. It leads to delay; it leads to unreliability;
it deals with unacceptable environmental pressures, and so on.
Q742 Chairman: Has the
Department finally worked out a way of assessing what congestion
is?
Mr Darling: We will do that by
the time we said we would do it, which is the summer.
Q743 Chairman: You have
talked about this before, Secretary of State, I hesitate to remind
you.
Mr Darling: I have. What I have
said to you on a number of occasions is that I did not think the
way the Department was measuring it when I arrived was the right
way to do it.
Q744 Chairman: You encouraged
them to do it the right way?
Mr Darling: I am encouraging them
to do it the right way, especially as technology improves. This
is an example of stuff that we did not do three years ago, and
I have shown you other examples in the past. We now have a better
way of looking at these things.
Q745 Chairman: You now
think you will have a formula which would, for example, tell us
which roads have the highest rates of congestion, the intra-urban
roads or the urban roads?
Mr Darling: We will be able to
tell for each road in the country what the level of congestion
is and what is causing it.
Q746 Chairman: Could you
also tell the cost so that when commercial interests say that
this particular scheme has impacted badly on them, you could make
some assessment and an accurate assessment?
Mr Darling: This is what Frank
Kelly does for a living.
Mr Kelly: The measurements will
allow you to work out the additional delay on each bit of road.
If the roads are untolled, then some assumptions about values
on time would translate that into a cost. If there are tolled
roads, then again people have choices as well and some smaller
assumptions would let you work out total cost.
Q747 Chairman: If we have
a piecemeal patchwork of a number of local charging schemes, how
would you finally envisage getting those all involved in a national
plan?
Mr Darling: It is precisely because
I want to avoid a piecemeal development that I think the Government
and only the Government can take a lead here. What would be a
disastrous system is if you were to end up having lot of local
authorities all with different schemes and no-one would understand
it, with lots of different technologies and different providers
of technology.
Q748 Chairman: How would
you deal with that? Are you going to stop them? Are you going
to insist on standardisation of charging schemes? Are you going
to insist on particular technologies? What are you going to do?
Mr Darling: I am in no doubt that
we would need to legislate, (a) to make it possible and (b) to
specify certain standards and try to rationalise it as much as
was sensible. Not all schemes would be the same in the sense that
Greater London's congestion is rather different congestion from
what you might find in Chester, Crewe or Edinburgh and so you
will have different applications of measures. Unless you have
some sort of standardised way of doing it, you would end up with
it being extremely complicated and therefore extremely expensive.
Q749 Chairman: How would
you apply this standardisation? Would you have a centralised form
of control or would you leave it all to individual local authorities?
Mr Darling: I think what you need
to do is to legislate to provide those things that you could standardise,
like the scope of charges, the way in which you attract people,
the back-up stuff and so on. Actually, what was appropriate for
each town or city is something you would have to allow a considerable
amount of leeway for because the conditions are different. David
Lamberti's committee looked at this, did it not, and what the
Government would need to do in this respect?
Mr Lamberti: One of the main areas
is getting the technology standardised so that if you have something
in your car and you drive to different schemes in different places,
you do not have five, six or seven different things in the windscreen.
Q750 Chairman: I think
we can all see the difficulties.
Mr Lamberti: There is work under
way on that in Europe. There is an Interoperability Directive
and a technical committee looking at how to implement that. The
Department has a trial project going on in Leeds looking at an
end-to-end electronic system. I think that was originally conceived
as a scheme to help local authorities in terms of the sorts of
technology they ought to be using if they are setting up electronic
schemes. There is a way forward on that.
Mr Darling: In the United States,
and I referred to the high occupancy vehicle lanes, they also
have lanes where you can pay to go into these priority lanes.
When they started doing them each state had a different system,
but they have now realised that is very difficult. As David has
said, if you are driving from the north-east coast of America
right the way down, you would have to have in your windscreen
a clutch of things to get you through it, so they are now standardising
them. That is why I say that if we were going to go down this
road, we would want to get that standardisation in at the start,
otherwise it would make it extremely expensive.
Q751 Chairman: Would the
existing legislation for road pricing not give you that flexibility?
Mr Darling: No. The existing legislation
allows congestion charging to take place but it is nothing like
comprehensive enough to go down this road.
Q752 Chairman: How would
a national scheme integrate with the existing local urban charging
schemes and the M6 toll road?
Mr Darling: As I said, at the
moment in this country you have a congestion charging scheme in
London; there is the possibility of one in Edinburgh, subject
to a referendum this month. There is one congestion charging scheme
and there is a small one in Durham of course and the possibility
of another one. At the moment, that is it. There is nowhere else
that we can see at the moment. You have one small stretch of toll
road, the M6 Toll, and of course you have estuarial road crossings,
and there is the possibility of the M6 Expressway. If we were
going to move and we decided as a government, as a country—and
this is something I think you would have to have some degree of
political consensus on because you would be spanning several parliaments—that
we were to go for a fully-fledged road pricing scheme, then, as
I said earlier, that would subsume all the other things. What
you could not have is a whole myriad of different ways of paying
for roads because that would not work. We are not at that stage
yet; we are still looking at the feasibility of road pricing.
If we were to decide that was the thing to do, then that would
have implications. For example, as London itself has said, if
they were to go for a road pricing scheme, they would look at
the cordon charging that they have at the present time. You would
have to take all these things into account.
Q753 Chairman: We have
taken a lot of evidence about the tab and beacon system. Would
you consider using an available technology to implement charging
on the strategic network in the short term?
Mr Darling: I have always said
that I think there are considerable difficulties in charging tomorrow
for something that is free today.
Q754 Chairman: We have
also heard evidence from people like the RAC who say that we are
moving towards a general consensus. In fact, nearly all the witnesses
here have not said to us "shall we have" or "shall
we not have", but they have said in various terms, including
the professionals in the industry, "This is inevitable".
The only argument is about the time in which it is implemented
and the method by which it is implemented.
Mr Darling: I do
not know about that. I have had many conversations with some of
the people to whom you refer. I do remember speaking to one gentleman
who represented a large number of motorists and he was saying
this. I said, "So if I announce tomorrow morning I am going
to toll a road that is free at the moment, would you and your
members back me?" He said, "I did not quite say that".
What we are talking about here is this: if we went for a road
pricing system, you would then be going from the present system
of paying for roads to different system. For example, if we build
the M6 Expressway, that would be tolling a new road. There is
a choice and drivers can do that. I am not convinced you could
say to people when everything is "free" today—because
of course you pay for these things in fuel tax and so on—that
you are going to charge them for going down a road tomorrow. I
think that is much more difficult, which is why I have said that
we are not proposing to do that. The most important thing we can
do, in terms of moving this thing on, is to use the information
as to what might be possible that would allow us to move to a
pricing system, at first locally and maybe then nationally. What
we need to do is work through those issues that need to be sorted
out, like the technology and who is paying for what, and see if
there is an area where we can try it out, and at the same time
try and build up public support. At the moment, I support the
majority of the British public. This is something that is new
and it is not being discussed in people's houses every evening.
I also think we need to get a degree of political consensus. Looking
round the table, we are not going to get very far today because
the rest of the consensus does not seem to be here.
Q755 Chairman: We may
lack numbers but we are of a terribly high quality.
Mr Darling: We are all on the
same side.
Q756 Chairman: You will
consider quite seriously the effects of things like the impact
on safety if charging is introduced on strategic roads and there
is a degree of diversion?
Mr Darling: Of course, and one
of the difficulties and one of the reasons I have always preferred
to look at a more generalised scheme is that if you were to charge
for the strategic road network alone, you would get displacement.
People will come off the motorways and they will go on to the
very roads that are supposed to have been bypassed. Instinctively,
I do not like the idea of charging for something that has not
changed one jot from the day before and you are just charging
people for the privilege of driving down it. Also, if you just
charge on one road, a sizeable number of people will divert.
Q757 Chairman: Secretary
of State, you have been very helpful and open but I still come
back to what is really the basic problem for us: what kind of
timescale are we talking about? Who is going to wave this magic
wand and produce this consensus in the public? Are we talking
about 20 years' time when I cannot expect to be here, although
perhaps you may be.
Mr Darling: I have no plans to
be here in 20 years' time but you never know. In relation to the
process, as I said, from more or less a standing start three years
ago, I came to the view that if we did not face up to matters,
we would have great problems. So I commissioned a feasibility
study. The members working on that, as you can see, are drawn
from a fairly wide range of people who are well disposed and some
not well disposed. It was interesting how they worked towards
a consensus. They highlighted about 15 things that the Government
would have to do if this was to go any further. We are, at the
moment, formulating our response to that. Obviously your views,
and I do not know what your timescale is for producing your report,
will be considered.
Q758 Chairman: We always
seek to influence you, Secretary of State. We will not let you
publish anything without us having a word.
Mr Darling: The sooner the better
I suppose is what I would say to you. We need to work through
these technical things so that we can answer some of the questions
you quite rightly put to us now, which it is not possible to answer
at present but which we do need to answer. The advice we have
is that if you were going to do something nationally, you could
not do it inside 10 to 15 years to move to a completely new system.
I do believe, though, that we could do something on a more local
scheme, as I have described, and we could do that rather more
quickly, within maybe five to six years.
Q759 Chairman: You would
expect to lay down a very clear set of parameters so that people
knew that, even within the local schemes and with the flexibility,
they must do certain things?
Mr Darling: Two things are necessary.
If we decided that we were going to do this just locally and suppose
we were not going to go any further than that, we would need to
set out a road map, as it were, setting out what are the things
that need to be done and the expectation so that people could
plan against that. That is what I intend to do when the Government
publishes its response and to be able to help people work towards
that. I want to do that and I hope I can do it in the not too
distant future.
Chairman: On that cheerful and optimistic
note, may I say thank you to you and your colleagues for coming.
This has been very helpful.
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