On the face of it, national road pricing looks to be dead. The 1.5 million people who signed the online anti-road-pricing petition on the 10 Downing Street website, plus the newspapers that pushed it, can’t be wrong. The government (according to some voices on its own backbenches) will have to forget its ‘poll tax on wheels’ and look for other ways to tackle traffic problems.
This might not sound like the moment to argue it, but it would not be difficult for the government to implement a national road-pricing scheme, as long as it follows three simple rules. First, treat road pricing as just part of a package, not a silver bullet solution. Second, put the money raised into public transport improvements. Third, engage others to spell out the benefits and realities of charging, to counter the fiction pushed by the scaremongers promoting the petition. If the government follows these rules, it could deliver part of the solution to the UK’s transport problems that would be politically saleable.
The environmental imperative to do something soon cannot be ignored. Road transport accounts for 21 per cent of total UK emissions of carbon dioxide, the main gas causing climate change, according to government statistics. And traffic reduction has social justice aims as well, since half our poorest households don’t have a car, and rely on public transport, lifts and walking to get around. The voices of those without access to cars (and also the poorer households whose children are most likely to die in road crashes) have been absent from the recent debate.
The problem we have is that the ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ to use a car is too often illusory. The UK is the most car-dependent country in Europe – we do more car mileage per head per year than any other country. Apart from London, where the trends have moved away from cars and towards public transport and cycling, Labour has not changed this. It’s getting more expensive to use public transport and cheaper to use a car. The cost of motoring fell eight per cent in real terms between 1997 and 2005, while bus fares rose 14 per cent and rail fares five per cent in the same period. Fuel duty has not kept pace with inflation, and tax, as a percentage of the fuel price, has fallen consistently since 2000, and is at its lowest since 1991.
Some of the support for the road-pricing petition comes from a frustration at these trends – and a lack of trust in government. Putting money from road pricing into public transport and alternatives to car-based transport would increase real transport choices – London has shown that these packages are well understood at local level and can enjoy public support.
The government needs to be clearer about road pricing and its wider context. The Institute for Public Policy Research discovered in 2006 that the public view is far from that of the petitioners. It found that people recognise that unrestricted motoring is not possible in a small country, and could support road pricing if strong political leadership addressed concerns over how any money raised is spent, how road pricing fits with current motoring taxes, and what would be done to improve public transport ahead of the introduction of a scheme.
If the government could be clearer about this, it would be able to enlist others to sell the benefits of road pricing and traffic reduction, and make clear all the people who would benefit from it – not just those on public transport, but residents facing less traffic noise and pollution, businesses getting more reliable journey times, and those that continue to drive, due to clearer roads.
The government shouldn’t be scared about taking a firm stance for a programme that will reduce traffic and help efforts to slow climate change. Not taking action is the more difficult stance to justify.