IT WAS intended to get London moving, but after five years of Ken
Livingstone’s congestion charge, and more than £800m of tolls and fines,
traffic jams are almost as bad as they were to start off with.
As a new cadre of charge bureaucrats prospers, overheads are now so high that
they burn up the equivalent of almost £4 of a standard £8 charge. Money
raised to improve public transport has been cut by 10% in the past year.
The scheme’s poor value for money risks undermining the government’s efforts
to push through congestion charging in 10 other areas around England.
Spending on the administration of the charge rose to more than £160m in the
past year, leaving £10m less for buses and schemes to improve traffic flow.
Traffic has slowed to below 10mph. Livingstone will further polarise opinion
next year with a £25 daily charge on cars with high carbon emissions –
including 4X4s such as the Toyota Land Cruiser but also the 2.5 litre Ford
Mondeo, Vauxhall Vectra 2.8L and Renault Espace 2.0.
Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation, warned that the London
scheme had set a “dangerous” precedent for the future of road pricing in
Britain. “Everybody looks to London and the danger is that they repeat the
same mistakes,” said King. “You could end up with cities across the UK
burdened with massive administration costs for schemes that don’t actually
improve public transport or reduce congestion.”
The government has asked 10 areas in England to draw up plans for a congestion
charge. So far Manchester and Cambridge have made formal bids, while Tyne
and Wear, Norwich, Bristol and a scheme in the East Midlands covering
Nottingham, Leicester and Derby are consulting and drafting plans.
Manchester wants to impose a peak time charge of up to £5 a day from 2012,
which it believes will be more efficient and cheaper than the London scheme.
“The congestion charge [in London] is a pretty blunt instrument because it
penalises journeys irrespective of where they originate, their destination,
how long they’ve travelled and what time of day it is,” said Sir Howard
Bernstein, chief executive of Manchester City Council.
“Our system is more efficient and costs far less. It incentivises drivers to
change their behaviour. We hope the government will see it as a pilot that
offers a pathway for the future.”
While in London operating costs have absorbed 47% of all revenues since 2003,
in Manchester predicted operating costs will be just 25% and in Cambridge
they are a predicted 16%.
Drivers in London are charged the fee from 7am to 6pm from Monday to Friday,
and are required to pay even if they are already in the zone.
Since the launch of the congestion charge on February 17, 2003, Ken
Livingstone, the mayor of London, and Transport for London (TfL) have
struggled to control the scheme's massive costs. The charge is operated by
Capita, which by 2009 will have been paid more than £330m. IBM will then
take over Capita’s contract.
Last year the scheme’s costs rose from £146.7m to £163.3m, a significant rise
even after stripping out the £15m spent over two years expanding the
congestion charge into west London.
Some of the high costs can be traced to Windsor House, TfL’s imposing,
18-storey central London headquarters, where 105 staff enjoy an average
salary of £70,000. A further 39 TfL staff are based at Capita’s offices in
Coventry. David Brown, TfL’s surface transport managing director, who has
overall responsibility for the congestion charge, earned a basic salary of
£250,000 last year with a bonus of £40,177. The costs of running the “toll
facilities”, which includes a network of 203 sets of cameras, was £130m last
year.
Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) software checks vehicles against a
database, and the details of every nonpayer are checked manually before a
fine of up to £100 is sent. With about 4,500 people fined per day, the
process is time-consuming and ANPR only achieves 90% accuracy.
By law all profits from the congestion charge have to be put into public
transport projects. According to one set of TfL accounts, it reinvested just
£280m since 2003. The vast majority went on bus garages, stops and digital
timetables; new road surfaces, with only a fraction allocated to walking and
cycling.
For Livingstone’s bureaucrats, London’s motorists are a seemingly
inexhaustible source of revenue. The standard £5 charge was raised to £8 in
July 2005; the area of the charging zone was almost doubled in February this
year to include Kensington and Chelsea, and Livingstone now plans to go a
step further.
In October 2008 he intends to introduce a pollution-based charge of £25 for
cars emitting 225g of carbon dioxide or more per kilometre. Owners of gas
guzzlers living inside the zone would lose their residents’ discount and be
charged more than £6,000 a year.
The new charge could make up to £36m, TfL has estimated. Smaller cars, such as
diesel hatchbacks and hybrid vehicles that emit 120g or less of carbon
dioxide per kilometre, will become exempt from February 2008. Those emitting
up to 225g/km would continue to be charged £8. The Department for Transport
said there was no legal cap on the size of the daily charge that councils
outside London would be allowed to impose.
Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate for London mayor, has pledged to review the
congestion charge if he gets into power. He said: “A small car is just as
capable of blocking a road as a big car. This is just Trotskyist guilt from
Ken, which he’s trying to expunge by lashing out at bigger cars in the name
of emissions.
“It’s diabolically expensive. Huge sums have disappeared down the gullet of
Capita and a lot has been taken by the mayor, but very little has gone into
improving roads and congestion. If we are going to ask people to pay to
travel in London, they deserve to get a better journey.”
While operating costs continue to rise, some of the initial benefits of the
congestion charge are wearing off. At the end of its first year, the results
looked encouraging: traffic speeds were the fastest for two decades, rising
from 8.69mph to 10.56mph. The benefits were short-lived. Traffic speeds are
now back down to 9.32mph while congestion is also on the rise, with the
level of delay per kilometre at 2.27 minutes compared with 2.3 in February
2003.
Without the congestion charge TfL maintains that London would have ground to a
halt, and states that 70,000 fewer vehicles a day enter the zone than in
2002. It is partly to blame. When the central London zone was extended
westwards, an additional 58,000 residents took up the entitlement to the 90%
resident’s discount. Any further expansion would exacerbate the problem.
The introduction of more bus lanes and pedestrian-friendly measures, TfL
admits, have also contributed to congestion. Twenty per cent more traffic
lights were added from 2000 to 2005, the latest year for which figures are
available, and they are being phased in favour of pedestrians, leaving
drivers stuck on red for longer.
There are signs that TfL is concerned that the high costs of its scheme may
risk undermining public support. It is considering introducing a cheaper
technology called “tag and beacon” by 2010. The system is favoured by both
Manchester and Cambridge.
A TfL spokesman claimed that an alternative set of accounts showed the amount
invested in public transport had increased from £122m in 2005-06 to £123m in
2006-07.
Pricing stalls
JUST a year ago, ministers were bullish about a national road pricing scheme.
Ministers were describing it as “inevitable” while plans had been drawn up
to use satellite location technology to charge motorists £1.34 a mile at
peak times.
Today, however, the government says little on the subject. Instead the
Department for Transport is focused on local congestion charging schemes,
the first of which will not be rolled out until 2012. Ten areas are
interested, tempted by the £1.4 billion in public transport improvements
being offered. The shift in policy has been forced on the government by a
groundswell of opposition to national road pricing. Earlier this year nearly
2m people signed a Downing Street petition against it.
The government was aware that national road pricing would be a huge risk in
terms of both technology and politics, said Edmund King, executive director
of the RAC Foundation. “If they can let the local authorities take the risk
and responsibility it’s better for them.”
Experts fear, however, that local road schemes involving cameras, beacons and
tags could prove incompatible with a satellite system when it arrives
eventually.
