Matthew Parris
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If a case can be made for this (and it can), it was kicked away in the early part of the 20th century as horse-drawn traffic fell, car ownership exploded and it struck ministers that fuel was easy to tax. The finally enormous revenues that this yielded were supplemented by vehicle excise duty — a tax on ownership, not use — and the proportion of national revenue raised from road users peaked at around 7 per cent in 1999. It is now about 5 per cent and set to dwindle towards zero in the years ahead.
How is this lost revenue to be replaced? The answer is obvious. Mere ownership of a car should not be taxed, as it imposes no costs on others until the car hits the road. When it does, motorists should be charged for the mileage they drive, just as we are charged for the phone calls we make, the electricity we consume and — increasingly, with the introduction of meters — the water we use. The beauty of paying for our roads in this way is that (unlike with fuel taxes) motorists can be charged according to whether they drive at peak times when roads are congested, or at quieter times. A good many of us can choose when we drive, so the effect will be to spread road usage more evenly across the day, reducing traffic jams and maximising the efficient use of an asset — the asset being tarmac.
This flexible application of charges will also allow us to favour motorists who use quieter roads; and because those parts of Britain where the car is often the only way of getting around are more or less coterminous with the rural-urban divide, we can favour the rural motorist. Congestion charges (such as we apply in London) are just an early, primitive and clumsy attempt to achieve the same end. Road pricing, infinitely variable, would supplant them. As a motorist you’d receive a monthly or quarterly bill for the roads you used, the distance you covered and the time you drove.
When, 40 years ago, I first argued for such ideas, the technology was challenging. It involved transmitters strapped to a vehicle’s underside and a system for transpondence with roadside detectors. Today all you’d require would be for your smartphone to talk to a central data-gathering system. In fact it already does. That’s how Google knows there’s congestion ahead. Where and when you’ve been driving is knowable already, and the only thing that’s needed is to charge you for it. Unlike our European neighbours we British have been slow to embrace road tolls, but we can now profit from our own impromptitude by skipping the lumbering intermediate system of forced halts at motorway toll booths, and moving straight to remote charging.
My argument was once put to a former prime minister. ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘But it won’t happen.’ Well it will. Or I’ll be back (d.v.) in five years to hurl myself, yet again, against indifference.
Many readers who saw my column last month about Lady Margaret Bullard’s memoir of a diplomatic wife, Endangered Species, have asked how it may be obtained. You can order it at st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/content/endangered-species
Because you read about cars
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