FOR SOMEONE whom Alastair Campbell once described as an “attention-seeker” I got off to an unpromising start as an MP. My seven years as a Tory backbencher in Margaret Thatcher’s Government were marked by dogged pursuit of an idea in which there was no flicker of media or public interest. Even my parliamentary colleagues would yawn when I mentioned it. My groundbreaking speeches in Standing Committee C on the Transport Bill fell stillborn.
But interest in the idea is dawning at last. The Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, whom I believe to be a potential Chancellor of the Exchequer (“But can we afford it, Darling?” Prime Minister Brown will have to say) has called for a great “national debate” on the subject of road pricing.
A great national debate is exactly what we don’t need, of course. The man in the street (or the woman in the 4.8-litre Chrysler Turbo Meanbastard 4x4) has little to contribute to the discussion beyond inevitable alarm (“Highway Robbery — Drivers will pay £16,000 a year just to use roads!” bellowed yesterday’s Daily Star. The figure was nonsensical).
Road-users’ alarm, which will reach a deafening pitch, must be sympathetically noted then cordially ignored. This plan is enormously in the motorists’ long-term interest, as rising opposition from the radical greens, who do not want any secure place for road transport in our national future, will show. Fatuous as the great debate will be, we should forgive Mr Darling for calling for it. This is his way of saying that he thinks road pricing is a good idea but the Cabinet is a bit nervous.
It is right to be nervous, for such a sharp change in the contract between the owner of the car and the owners of the roads will be politically difficult — as difficult as the introduction of driving licences and driving tests, shocking innovations fiercely resisted (like speed limits and breath-testing) in their time. It will be easy and cheap for opposition politicians to make hay with Mr Darling’s plans.
Alan Duncan, the Shadow Transport Secretary and the latest contender to enter the Tory leadership race, has called for a battle of ideas within his party. I have read Mr Duncan’s book, Saturn’s Children, written many years ago while he was still unencumbered by hopes of office, and it is clear as daylight that road-pricing chimes beautifully with his (and my) Tory philosophy; we shall judge Mr Duncan’s genuineness in his call for a real battle of ideas by his response to a big idea he knows is right. So far he is hedging.
The big idea is little changed from the one I was canvassing in the early 80s. Even then the technology was within reach. The Department of Transport’s Transport and Road Research Laboratory and the Government of Hong Kong commissioned a plan for cars in the colony to be fitted with small transponders, about the size of an audio-cassette. These uniquely identified each car to electronic monitors placed by the highway. Hong Kong motorists would receive a monthly bill, like a telephone bill, for the roads they had used at the times when they had used them. Hong Kong was to be the testing ground.
Then the plug was pulled abruptly on the plan, though no big technical problems had arisen. Maybe there were fears of what the territory’s future governors in Beijing might do with the potential for survellance. A quarter century later, I hope we shall finish what we almost started in Hong Kong. The civil libertarian objection remains a slight worry, but car-borne transponders identify the car, not the driver, and for any government agency determined to track a person’s movements, mobile phones (and, in the Metropolis, London Transport Oyster cards) offer more potential.
A much cruder “congestion charging” scheme has proved an almost unmitigated success. The London scheme was potentially more problematical technically because number-plates have to be “read”, and it is more troublesome from the user’s point of view because the driver has to pay on the day, whereas under the sort of scheme that Mr Darling proposes, the motorist simply waits for the bill.
The beauty of the idea (I speak of its potential rather than the Government’s immediate proposals, which at first will have to err on the side of simplicity) is that it is infinitely variable as to the particular road, as to the time the road is used, and as to type, size and engine capacity of vehicle: some rural country roads could be free; some vehicles could pay less or nothing; busy roads could offer discounted rates at off-peak hours; tourists could be stung with premium-rate pay-as-you-go temporary transponders.
Within a decade we could maximise the efficient 24-hour use of all the roads we have, reducing the need to build new ones. We could weight the system in favour of less environmentally intrusive vehicles. And by making the road tax disc free, we could achieve 100 per cent vehicle registration, whose avoidance makes the work of the police more difficult.
But as Lenin said: “Who? Whom?” Who wins and at whose expense? Though the very poorest, who have no cars, are an obvious (if small) group of winners, the Conservatives should look carefully at this question because their natural supporters will be pretty well represented among those who gain. People for whom congestion is more irksome than the payment of a few bucks to shift it; mothers stuck in jams when taking their children to school; little old ladies who own cars but use them little; those who run up high mileages in business travel on corporate expenses; country-dwellers whose roads will be the cheapest, or free . . . many of these should benefit.
Losers will include the small-business self-employed (an urban locksmith, for example), the transport industry as a whole (for whom any shift from flat-rate to usage-based imposts hurts) and those among the urban poor who can just about afford a car. It is not clear to me that either main party can be certain how its support may be affected, except that every fiscal change is greeted with widespread suspicion at first.
A temptation for Mr Darling will be to pledge that all the money raised will go back “to the motorist”. This would be dishonest and wrong. “Hypothecating” revenue narrowly is always a tricksy business, and in this case it would spoil an argument which could attract the reasonable elements of the environmental lobby: that investment or subsidy for public transport could be boosted by these revenues. Another temptation would be to promise to cut or hold down fuel taxes; this too would be a pity. They are easy to collect, “green” in their effect on motorists’ decisions, and raise squillions.
No administrative reform I can think of would be more useful or benign than this: tailoring the use of a scarce resource (tarmac) to national need. No country in Europe is in more urgent need of it. And the technology needed to run the scheme and the administration needed to support it are easily within our grasp.
As Ken Livingstone, who at first faced terrific opposition, found, it gets harder then it gets easier. Mr Darling, if he sticks to his guns, will find the same. This plan will divide those for whom politics is just a game on the stock market of political fortunes, who will say “leave it alone”, and those for whom politics is about good government, who will at once see its strengths.
A kindly fellow member of that Transport committee 20 years ago, Stephen Ross, then the Liberal MP for the Isle of Wight, warned me that though my pet proposal was undoubtedly right and should be at the centre of national debate, its day would not come “until I, and perhaps even you, are dead and gone”.
Lord Ross of Newport died ten years later. My confidence rises that before I follow him, this bee in my bonnet will fly.
