June/July 2003

The UK Government has published its plans for introducing a telematics-based lorry road-user charge from 2006, under which hauliers will pay tax related to the distance vehicles travel on UK roads.

Customs and Excise will be responsible for the scheme. To conform to the European Commission's integrated transport aims, it is looking at the same telematics-based technology as other member-states to monitor road usage. It is currently consulting with industry, and plans to have a tender document ready by the end of 2003.

Customs & Excise is proposing that all trucks over 3.5 tonnes gross should have on-board units, which will record distance travelled, type of road, and possibly time of day - and will have a means of transmitting the data to the relevant charging body, which will bill the operator.

At the least, this will mean a GPS receiver plus communications capability, and operators fears that unless the specification is open-ended enough, there will be duplication of equipment and unnecessary cost.

 

By using an on-board unit to capture all data, the Government avoids the expense of installing thousands of roadside vehicle recognition units and doing the number-crunching itself. But someone has to provide the computing capacity, and if that falls to each on-board computer, these will be more expensive than if they were simply relaying their position to a central computer.

C&E admits differentiating between road types presents "a considerable technical challenge", but believes that including non-motorway roads is essential in order to prevent trucks re-routing away from motorways to avoid charges. It also admits it might outsource administration of the scheme.

It is now asking for proposals on how a back-office scheme might be organised, and says it will have to include repayment, mapping, charging matrices, debt management and security protocols such as data encryption. On enforcement, it suggests that sites with automatic number-plate recognition would be less disruptive to operators than roadside checks. It expects that eventually the DVLA will automatically register vehicles for road-charging when they are first entered on its database.

A complication is that the lorry road-user charge is supposed to be revenue-neutral and replace fuel duty. However, C&E has not yet determined how it can distinguish between trucks over 3.5 tonnes which pay the road-user charge, and light trucks which will not.