Aug/Sept 2007

The spectre of telematics-based lorry road-user charging, which appeared to have been laid to rest after the long saga leading up to its abandonment two years ago, loomed again as the Conservative Party published the high-profile Freeing Britain to Compete paper from John Redwood's office in August.

The lengthy paper is relatively brief in its mention of the subject, but it does say pointedly that an incoming Conservative government 'should implement a system of charging all lorries for their mileage on British roads.'

No specific mention is made of what technology would be used to achieve this, or what costs would be involved. There is certainly no reference to anything akin to the elaborate telematics-based systems envisaged before. But neither is there any indication of how it could be avoided.

The paper makes the same pledge as Labour did that the overall level of taxation would not rise. However, even the modest proposal put at the time by Heriot-Watt university as an alternative to the official high-technology scheme (and pointedly ignored by the Government) was acknowledged to carry a multi-million pound price tag. Any new scheme would presumably have to find a way of offsetting such costs.

 

In other respects, the terminology used by the report to justify the idea has strong echoes of that used by the Labour Party in the past. 'British truck owners could compete more fairly, without breaking any EU rules,' it says. 'The Treasury would benefit from extra revenues as foreign trucks started to pay user charges; and there would be more money to pay for much needed road improvements.'

The Freight Transport Association, which continued to support the former LRUC scheme even against a rising clamour of industry opposition, has acknowledged that the Tory proposal 'appears to be similar' to it, and says it cautiously welcomes the plan. It points out that UK diesel is currently taxed at 48p per litre against an average for the rest of the EU of just 23p per litre.

However, the FTA has also repeated its demand that there should be no real increase in the level of taxation on UK commercial vehicles for the foreseeable future.

It appears that the Conservatives have shrewdly avoided the dirty detail of their proposal. Whilst the report acknowledges the imbalance in fuel taxation between the UK and the Continent (a running sore among fleet operators), it evades any explanation of how the Tories would actually tackle this.

If they are voted in at the next election, though, and the new regime takes this proposal on board, the Conservatives could land themselves in a minefield as the same old arguments surface again.

The paper also includes a commitment to improve Britain's roads in a bid to enhance competitiveness and combat congestion - evidently taking a more robust view on this issue than the environmentally-wary Labour government. The Tories want more public-private partnerships such as that which spawned the M6 toll road - though they tacitly accept the need for controls on resulting tolling regimes.

Meanwhile, the UK's Labour Government is pressing ahead steadily with its own ideas on road pricing, which nowadays involve local-authority schemes rather than national projects. The Department for Transport's latest transport bill would give authorities new powers to set up local schemes, and it is known that a number of authorities are keen to take them up.

However, the FTA and the Road Haulage Association are both taking a cautious view. FTA says members 'want to see up-front evidence that charging schemes are going to have the positive effects councils are saying they will,' and says any scheme, whether national or local, will have to go hand in hand with road infrastructure improvements.