Parliament’s Transport Select Committee (TSC) is cross with the Treasury for not returning its calls about road pricing.
In February last year, the TSC presented a “substantial” inquiry into road pricing, using four witness panels, 148 evidence submissions and 13 recommendations on how the government could implement it.
Last week, in a fairly brief statement, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt said the government “does not currently have plans to consider road pricing”. The TSC is upset that he isn’t listening, that his department “has not meaningfully engaged with the substance of [the] report” and that if it wanted to be ignored about something so important, it could have stayed home and talked to its teenage children.
The TSC’s concern – and this will matter to all of us – is that as drivers migrate to electric cars, there’s going to be a hole in tax revenue that vehicle excise duty and fuel duty currently fill. Combined they raise £35 billion, 4% of total tax take, and, as you will know, that isn’t all spent on fixing potholes.
As we buy electric cars, fuel duty take will decrease, and there’s currently no plan to replace it. The Treasury says it’s too preoccupied with the cost of living to worry about it yet, but I wonder if it also realises that road pricing is deeply unpopular.
For one, it brings privacy concerns, with drivers not wanting their employers to see bills for the road to the golf club when they were meant to be in a meeting or their spouses to know they were shagging Jason from purchasing when they said they were at the football.
But perceived to be worse is the chance that if roads become priced, mysterious forces may tell you – or at least ‘persuade’ you – where you can and can’t drive by raising prices in certain places and at certain times and make travelling ruinously expensive when you’ve just got a car full of kit for the kids, stuff for the dog, shopping for Gran and damn it you’re just trying to go about life and no you can’t
