Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

Amendment 75ZAB stands in my name and in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine. This amendment comes out of a fairly recent discovery about some new roads that have received permissions under development consent orders. If the developer wishes to put a charge or toll on them then, for some reason, it has to be a fixed-toll plaza, with lots of toll booths and the old fashioned things that one sees on motorways in France, on the M6 toll, and the Dartford crossing. It seems rather odd that a developer who seeks planning permission to build a toll road needs to be told as part of getting consent that if he is going to put a toll or a charge on it then it has to be a fixed-toll point. It seems to me that that has very little to do with planning—except for the planning permission of the site—and that the method of tolling should come out of a policy from the Department for Transport. I have had a useful meeting with officials on it.

It makes me recall the debate that we have in your Lordships’ House every now and then when the American embassy refuses to pay the congestion charge because it says it is a tax. One or two other embassies do the same thing. We all get a bit upset about that and the Foreign Office tries to make the embassies pay. It is an argument, but what is a toll, what is a charge and what is a tax? It is basically something you pay for going into a tunnel or across a bridge or up a road.

I have put down the amendment because I strongly believe that the Department for Transport should now have a policy on tolling. I do not mean which roads should be tolled and which ones should not be because that is a separate issue. We have the London congestion charge, we have tolls for the Dartford tunnel and for the Birmingham northern relief road, and we have lorry road-user charging coming in. The lorry road-user charging is going to be time-based rather than distance-based, which is odd. Nobody else in Europe is going time-based but that is probably why we are. Worse still, if these all move forward, you are going to have to have separate equipment in your car or lorry for each area, road, tunnel or bridge that you wish to use because I suspect that more and more of the crossings that now have toll booths will wish to convert to taking money while you are on the move because it is so much easier and cheaper and, of course, it is quicker for the person paying.

Cheapness comes into it. Noble Lords will correct me if I am wrong but the cost of collection of the congestion charge in London is something like 30% of the amount you pay. With some of the modern electronic systems used in other cities and some motorways on the continent, you are getting down to about 5%, which means that the developer keeps more of his money. One hopes that one day the Department for Transport, maybe in its new roads policy which we were told about earlier in the Committee stage, will come up with a policy on tolling. That should include one system for the whole country—one technical system—that you can have in your car. That means a common technology and it would be much better if it was common throughout Europe. Then it would be up to the developers, the Government or whoever to decide what rate should be charged for using whatever facility you need. We want to get away from the idea that if you are getting consent for a particular crossing or something with a development consent order, it has to specify the type of toll booth, which seems to be a rather retrograde step. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Baroness Valentine]

My Lords, Amendment 75ZAB stands in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I declare that I am chief executive of London First, a business membership organisation.

The demands on our roads are growing. In major urban centres such as London, there are severe physical limits to building more capacity, and congestion is a serious problem. I believe that road charging will be an important part of that solution as we seek to manage our resources more efficiently. A more sophisticated charging scheme will need to deliver reduced and more certain journey times. As the noble Lord mentioned, London is ahead of the pack: it already has a congestion charging zone, which is now widely accepted, including by all political parties.

This amendment would enable Transport for London to develop intelligent, barrier-free charging systems for new or existing roads or river crossings in response to the growing demand for road space. This is more than an academic point. Transport for London is currently consulting on a new tolled river crossing at Silvertown in east London. There is a real dearth of river crossings on the east side of London, in contrast to the west, and a new crossing here would help relieve the Blackwall tunnel and would support new jobs and growth in east London.

[Lord Berkeley]

Can the noble Baroness confirm that this should apply—and the amendment does apply—well outside London? There is a plan for a new road or motorway linking Felixstowe to Birmingham—of course, I would rather it was a railway, but that is irrelevant—and there is talk of it being tolled. There are lots of other plans for tolled motorways in the offing, so am I right in thinking it would be a national system?

[Baroness Valentine]

Yes, indeed, it would be a national system.

[Lord Snape]

My Lords, I support my noble friend and the noble Baroness in this amendment. It is something that I personally feel strongly about. I live near Birmingham in the West Midlands and I use the tolled section of the motorway quite frequently on my journeys north. It is a very convenient way of missing the congestion that can be found around spaghetti junction and the Ray Hall viaduct, the elevated section of the M6—until one reaches the toll booths, where we have this medieval concept of queuing to pay, the sort of thing one did with a horse and cart centuries ago. Invariably, I find myself behind someone who has got in the wrong lane, or someone who does not have the right money or cannot find their credit card, and a lot of the time saved by using the toll road is lost as one queues to get through this barrier. Surely there has to be a better way.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, said, in this day and age it should surely be possible to have a more modern system of collecting revenue for toll roads. It is 25 years since I first went to Singapore. The authorities there managed to collect congestion charges electronically three decades ago in a way that is apparently beyond us on the Midlands motorway. I ask the Minister to bear that in mind.

Perhaps I may test the patience of the Committee for two or three more minutes while I am on this hobby-horse of the Midlands motorway. At the moment it is comparatively lorry-free because the private owners—I understand that Macquarie, the Australian company, is the main shareholder in the Midlands motorway—deliberately, as a matter of policy, price off heavy goods vehicles. Those heavy goods vehicles then use the existing M6 over the elevated section at the Ray Hall viaduct and past spaghetti junction—a section of the M6 that is regularly and expensively under repair because of those very same heavy goods vehicles which, whatever the very effective road lobby says, do not pay their true track costs and do enormous damage.

Thanks to the generosity of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, when she was Prime Minister in the 1980s, Macquarie was given the concession to run the Midlands motorway in perpetuity, and can charge what it likes. The last thing it wants is a non-stop procession of heavy goods vehicles, because that damages its motorway. It is no accident that the bit of motorway infrastructure regularly under repair anywhere in the country is the left-hand lane, because that is the one used by heavy goods vehicles. It is a nonsensical situation in which the British taxpayer has paid literally hundreds of millions of pounds. I know the Ray Hall viaduct quite well; it was in my former constituency of West Bromwich East. When the former Prime Minister John Major talked about the cones hotline he had the Ray Hall viaduct and the spaghetti junction interchange in mind. Miles of it are regularly coned off because of the damage done by heavy goods vehicles, which use that section of the M6 because they are deliberately priced off the Midlands motorway.

There are two matters here that I hope the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, will address. The first is the nonsensical and medieval concept of stopping to pay a toll, having used a road on which I must confess to breaking the speed limit occasionally myself. I have rarely if ever seen a police vehicle on that privately-owned section of motorway, although having said that I have no doubt I can expect to see one in the very near future. The taxpayer had to pay literally hundreds of millions of pounds because of the pricing policy on that section of toll road, which keeps off heavy goods vehicles. Both of those matters are complete nonsense. No one blames the Minister personally, but can he do anything about it?