The Cornerstone Group

The “big idea”

New Labour’s obsession with the “big idea” has destroyed any chance they might have had of developing a credible transport policy.

First it was get people out of their cars and onto public transport.  When that failed, it was  vastly ambitious national road pricing, forcing people out of their cars through their wallets – as if Gordon Brown hadn’t been trying to do that all along.

Meanwhile, I am researching a Conservative Party Green Paper on roads and road transport, travelling throughout the UK, North America and Europe to look at different ideas, meeting dozens of leading experts and studying many different projects.

Although my thinking has not yet crystallised, I am now convinced that the only “big idea” that will ever work is to commit to not having a “big idea”.  We need a wide range of different measures which combined together will radically improve road transport.

Having gone from 26.3 million vehicles in 1996 to 33.4 million in 2006, with further growth expected, it is evident that some additional road capacity will be needed, even though we remain committed to expanding public transport.

However, there is no point in building new roads unless they are managed effectively.  I have seen privately financed roads, where variable pricing has doubled capacity, while cutting journey times by two-thirds.  I believe, therefore, that intelligently designed local road pricing schemes are one tool which can help achieve better road management.

Any such schemes, however, must offer real benefits to road users, and must not simply be revenue raising devices.  There must be alternatives for people who do not wish to pay extra charges. Any revenue surplus must go towards transport improvements and enforcement must be seen to be fair.

Next, Sir Rod Eddington made a good argument for addressing “pinch points” in the road system, with small, relatively cheap schemes, which could yield disproportionately high benefits to the road system as a whole.  But it will take the Conservative Party’s commitment to localism to make it happen.  Local experimentation in the United States has led to interesting developments in junction management; the Dutch province of Vriesland has led the way on shared space.

Another tool which needs to be exploited is in-car information technology, to enable drivers to avoid congestion and improve route planning.  Also, we need a new approach to safety, to reduce accidents which, themselves are a major cause of congestion.  This would include a more rational approach to speed management, better driver training, skill enhancement incentives, and life-long learning.

Central to my thinking is that any road transport strategy must also reduce the environmental impact of road transport, and make a contribution to improving local environments.  Price incentives can dramatically improve vehicle technologies. 

I am also looking at strategies to reduce demand, such as encouraging in a systematic way more home working, and other ways of reducing the need for people to travel to work. 

In conclusion, I have to emphasise that nothing is cast in stone and I am wide open to any ideas which might help bring our road transport system into the 21st Century, after the decade of neglect by New Labour and Gordon Brown.

This website will be going interactive soon and I would very much welcome your comments and suggestions.  In the meantime, please e-mail me at patersono@parliament.uk.  

Owen Paterson, MP for North Shropshire and Shadow Minister of State for Transport

Down to Earth

Although Gordon Brown’s total tax take increased by £25 billion in the last financial year to bring it to a record £423 billion, feeding the inflated public sector is now so costly that even this huge amount does not leave enough to make up for ten year’s neglect of the nation’s road system.

Doing nothing is not an option.  The consequences of inertia were spelt out in a report which he commissioned from his own guru, Sir Rod Eddington last December, who pointed out that an overstretched transport system would constrain economic growth. 

Crucially though, when it came to public spending on roads, Sir Rod also gave Gordon the ultimate opt-out.  He told the Chancellor that comprehensive road-pricing could cut congestion by half and produce economic benefits worth a total of £28 billion a year by 2025.

“Given the scale of the congestion challenge, I believe that there is no attractive alternative to road pricing,” he wrote.  “Without a widespread scheme by 2015, the UK will require very significantly more transport infrastructure.”

Hidden in the small print though was a warning that is now proving only too prescient: “… road pricing on this scale is new and at this stage has unknown implementation costs. There are very significant risks and uncertainties involved in delivering a pricing policy, particularly around the technology needed for its delivery. Potential technologies exist but have never been used at a national level.”  The costs, he estimated, could be between £10 and £60 billion.

However, there is an even more mundane show stopper.  In 2005, 2,193,000 vehicle owners failed to pay their vehicle excise duty, compared with 1,240,000 in 2004.  One in 15 are dodging road tax and speeding fines and, even more striking, more than a million speeding fines are not paid each year, partly because the drivers cannot be traced.

I have seen successful road pricing schemes in North America and Europe; the key to their success is firm but fair enforcement, based on an accurate database and the active co-operation of the majority of drivers.

In contrast, a recent survey of the data held by our own Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency showed that 32 percent of records contained errors, and 10 percent contained significant errors.

Therein, lies the problem.  To process all these data requires a massive database, on a scale that has never yet been attempted, yet the government is unable even to maintain an accurate record of vehicle registrations and drivers.  New Labour are already notorious for their expensive IT failures, so the chances of them maintaining an accurate road charging database are next to nil.  Without it, comprehensive road pricing cannot succeed.

To all intents and purposes, this immensely ambitious project is dead, leaving Gordon Brown squeezed between rising congestion and the need for more road capacity, with nowhere to go and no money in the kitty

Tomorrow, I offer some ideas for the way forward.

Pie in the sky

There are different techniques for collecting road charges. Most drivers are familiar with traditional toll booths where they hand over cash before being allowed past a barrier.

The more modern version relies on each user’s vehicle having a card with an embedded micro-chip carrying details which can be read from a gantry, enabling operators to charge the motorist. This is known as the “tag and beacon” system.

However, the hugely ambitious nature of comprehensive road charging, envisaged by both Darling and Alexander ruled out using tried and tested systems. To have multiple toll booths or gantries on every road would, quite obviously, be impractical and massively expensive. Satellite positioning would have to be used.

Germany already charges 12-ton plus lorries using GPS, but only on the Autobahn network.  In 2004 a US-EU agreement on the use of satellite navigation systems made using GPS as the basis of any new road charging scheme more difficult.  It was also believed that Galileo would deliver more accurate data.

Gordon Brown’s Treasury authorised the expenditure on the EU’s rival Galileo programme, which the EU Commission confidently announced would be ready by 2008 – comfortably in advance of the scheduled 2015 start for road charging in Britain. What Brown should have foreseen, however – before pumping hundreds of millions of hard-earned taxpayers’ money into the system - was that the EU’s plans were fatally flawed.

The research phase was paid by European taxpayers but to get Galileo operational, the EU planned to use private finance.  Private companies were to use their own money to build and launch the 30 satellites that would be needed, plus all the ground stations, and then run the system.

It was the use of private finance which required the EU to charge for use of the satellite signals, in the hope that a multi-billion euro market could be developed to give a return to the private investors - all on the basis of the system offering greater accuracy than the American GPS.

Hamstrung by the bureaucracy for which the EU is famed, though, the timetable immediately started slipping, while costs spiralled. Then, the US announced that it was to upgrade its own system, matching the potential accuracy of Galileo.

To add to the woes, the Russians also announced an upgrade to their Glonass system. Next, the Chinese pitched in with their own proposal for a system, Beidou.  Both would be free of charge to the end user.

Of four potential systems, three would be free, while only the EU proposed to charge its users. Any rationale for the original commercial model – slender at best – had evaporated. The commercial syndicate set up by the EU to develop the system pulled out, one despairing executive remarking, “Why sell Pepsi-Cola when you can get Coca-Cola free?”

As it now stands, only a single test satellite has been launched. None of the 30 main satellites has yet been built and even the second test satellite, due for launch six months ago, was grounded because of incurable electrical “short circuiting”.

A highly optimistic date for completion of the system is now 2012, which no one believes, and then only if Mr Jaques Barrot, the EU’s Transport Commissioner can convince the UK and other participating states to part with several billion euros needed to launch the satellites, and sign a blank cheque to underwrite their ongoing running costs.

Thus, all Gordon has to show for his estimated £500 million spend is a lonely test satellite orbiting in space.

Tomorrow, we come down to Earth, and find that things are no better there.

STOP PRESS: I am genuinely sorry that Graham Brady has resigned.  We were both first elected in 1997.  I know him well; he is much liked and respected.  In the course of time I hope that he will return to the front bench.  In the meantime I wish Mark Francois the very best of luck as Shadow Europe Minister.  As the Galileo fiasco shows, there is plenty to get stuck into.

Owen Paterson is MP for North Shropshire and Shadow Minister of State for Transport

Pay up and pay the game

New Labour was elected on a simplistic anti-car platform; increasing public transport would replace car usage. After the 1997 general election, the spectacularly incompetent Transport Secretary, John Prescott, said, “I will have failed if in five years time there are not … far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it.”

In December 1999, he promised: “We’re going to have a transport system to rival the best in Europe” (only to telephone a senior official the next day for the facts and figures about how far behind Europe our transport system was).

The following year, in his 10-Year Plan, he then promised congestion would be reduced by up to six percent by 2010.  Despite massive spending on public transport, local bus use was to decline by 11 percent on the decade and even with over £1 billion in subsidies, fares would increase by 20 percent. Gordon Brown’s extra spending simply failed to prevent the remorseless rise of vehicle ownership, from 26.3 million in 1996 to 29.7 million in 2001 and to 33.4 million in 2006.

By the time Alastair Darling took over in 2001 he could do nothing other than admit the obvious: Prescott’s policies had utterly failed. Darling conceded defeat and announced that he expected a 20 percent rise in congestion by 2010.

To deal with this, however, was going to require expensive new roads – a complete U-turn in New Labour policy – and, as long as Gordon Brown was paying the bills, this was never going to happen.  The new Transport Secretary, therefore, came up with an answer – universal road charging, imposing pay-as-you drive charges on every motorist in the country.

The only way such an ambitious scheme could work though was to adopt relatively new and untried technology using satellite positioning, such as the GPS system that was being provided free of charge by the United States government.  On the grounds that there were doubts about whether GPS would be continuously available, Darling gambled on the EU developing a rival system Galileo. 

In 2002, he and his EU colleagues staked £3 billion on its development; this has so far cost the UK taxpayers an estimated  £500 million.

Then, in June 2005 he announced his intention to launch his nation-wide scheme, with trials starting in 2010, the charges eventually replacing road tax and petrol duty.  The change was needed, he said, if the UK was to avoid the possibility of “LA-style gridlock” within 20 years.

Nevertheless, Darling was not to see the plan through.  He gave way to the current Transport Secretary, Douglas Alexander, who said in one of his first speeches in office that he considered road pricing “a personal priority” which could be introduced nationally by 2016.

He proposed a series of regional trials, “to inform the debate” in return for substantial payments for local infrastructure improvements, from a new Transport Innovation Fund.  His declared aim was to move “…the debate from ‘why’ to ‘how’ we might make a national system work in practice”.

However, public opinion was moving the other way and Alexander was confronted with 1.8 million signatories to a Downing Street petition who called for road pricing to be abandoned.  Meanwhile, the technical wheels were coming off Gordon Brown’s transport wagon. 

Tomorrow, I explore the reasons for this.

Stuck in a traffic jam?  Blame Gordon.

We groan under the weight of over 150 stealth taxes since Gordon “Prudence” Brown took office in 1997 – now amounting to £1,500 for every working person in the country – but, as every driver knows, to enable him to sustain his reckless level of spending, in ten years as Chancellor, he has also milked the road transport system. 

During that period, Britain’s major road network has increased by less than one percent, motorway traffic has grown by 36 percent.

Yet, for the “privilege” of suffering more and more congestion, Mr Brown has been extracting £42.2 billion a year from road users: fuel tax £22.1 billion; Vehicle Excise Duty £4.6 billion; VAT on vehicles £6.8 billion; VAT on fuel £5.6 billion and company car tax £3.1 billion – plus another £75.2 billion into the economy through their purchase of vehicles, fuel and basic running costs.

By contrast, the expenditure on UK roads infrastructure in 2003 (the last figures available) was a mere £6.7 billion.  As a result, our motorway network now ranks among the least developed in Europe (motorway network length to unit of GDP). The UK is fourteenth out of a European league table of 15 - only Ireland has fewer miles.  Congestion is estimated to cost the country at least £15 billion a year.
 
Not only that, Gordon Brown has also been skimping on road repairs, threatening irreparable damage to the very infrastructure on which he so much relies.

By 2002, the repairs backlog was estimated at  £7.4bn, and by this year, English local authorities were complaining that it would take 11.1 years just to clear the existing shortfall.  However, instead of being allowed to spend funds already paid by road users, to repair roads properly, local authorities were having to fill potholes at a rate of over one million a year, at a cost of £37 million.

Remarkably, in 2007, even more was spent on compensation for damage to vehicles, which amounted to £43 million. This did not include the cost of the 42,000 days of local authority staff time spent handling claims.

This fiasco is the responsibility of Gordon Brown.  Not only has he had absolute control of the money, he has manoeuvred into post the last two Transport Secretaries, two Scottish lawyers - Alistair Darling (so close he is now hot favourite to be the next Chancellor), and former Edinburgh solicitor Douglas Alexander, who started off his political career as Brown’s Parliamentary researcher and speechwriter.  Between them, they have come up with a cunning plan: to charge us even more.

Tomorrow, I will reveal how the wheels are coming off this “cunning plan”.

Owen Paterson is MP for North Shropshire and Shadow Minister of State for Transport