1 March 2007
Road pricing may or may not be the answer to congestion, but it must be considered as an option, Tony Blair has told Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond in our podcast.
Parts of this transcript may have been edited
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Richard Hammond:
Hello, I am Richard Hammond and I am in the White Room at No 10 Downing Street where I have been invited to chat with Prime Minister Tony Blair about road pricing. 1.8 million have signed up now to a petition to complain and object against it and I am here to put some of those views to the Prime Minister and find out what he thinks.
We are obviously here to talk road pricing, the issues of, which you will be aware quite a lot of people have got opinions on. And I thought, if you don’t mind, probably the best use of our time is for me to just put forward some of the objections, some of the points that people have raised and to hear from you directly your thoughts. But just before we get to those I just wonder, the motorist, because you talk a lot about, your government at the moment talks a lot about the motorist, who is the motorist in your eyes, who do you think it is we are talking about?
Prime Minister:
I mean most people have to use their car, most people want to, but actually even more than that most people have to and they have to use it, you know that is why I have always been absolutely in favour of choice rather than forcing people in any particular direction. And you know if you are taking your kids to school, or if you are going to work, at least if there is not very good public transport, or if you live in a rural area you need your car.
Richard Hammond:
So when we say the motorist, it is not that sort of Mr Toad issue, because if there was a scale there is sort of me on one end, because I am a self-confessed anorak, … even Prime Ministers are familiar with as an anorak, but at the other end of the scale it might be, because I still reckon that even if you don’t use your car, if your meals on wheels are delivered in them then effectively you are a motorist in that you are affected by …
Prime Minister:
But also I think sometimes what people forget, I mean when you become Prime Minister, right, for security reasons they stick you in the back of the car and you are driven. But before, even when I was leader of the opposition I drove my kids to school in the morning and I couldn’t possibly have done without a car. So it is not a problem, that, for me at all. The issue is, I mean I wish I wasn’t having this debate, but the reason I am having it is that I can see a huge problem looming up ahead, I mean it won’t be me who solves it incidentally, which is one rather nice thing about this debate, I can be quite objective about it, but the amazing thing is that there are 6 million more cars on the road since we came to office, almost 7 million actually from 26 million to 33 million I think it was, someone was telling me, and over the next 20 years there are going to be I don’t know how many millions more.
Richard Hammond:
There are issues surrounding congestion and what this whole thing …
Prime Minister:
Yeah.
Richard Hammond:
You have said that it won’t be you that has to solve it directly because you won’t be here doing that job, but somebody will. Can we get round then to that debate?
Prime Minister:
Yes.
Richard Hammond:
Do you mind if I just put forward …
Prime Minister:
Yes, no absolutely.
Richard Hammond:
Because there are 1.8 million on the petition.
Prime Minister:
Quite so, you have got to take notice of that.
Richard Hammond:
And did you feel surprised by the response to it?
Prime Minister:
Not terribly, because I went through the fuel protest, so I was well aware of, you know people care about this because it is a major part of their lives and it is a major part of their expenditure, so you know you start messing around with the motorist at your peril, and that is why I say to people you know I don’t do it because I think oh this would be a good argument to get into.
Richard Hammond:
So when we are talking about the motorist we are agreed then it is pretty much all of us in one way or another, which is just this word that sort of demonises the role, but it is something we all do directly or indirectly.
Prime Minister:
Yes.
Richard Hammond:
Can we talk then, one of the things that people have raised a lot - fairness. A lot of people said as motorists we are already taxed because we have to have a tax disc on the car before we can use it on the roads, the duty on fuel now is 60, 70, nearly 80%, it rose between …
Prime Minister:
Well I think it is less now, to be absolutely honest, as a result of getting rid of the fuel duty escalator …
Richard Hammond:
And it is also yes because it is a specific amount isn’t it, as opposed to a specific percentage, it depends rather on the price of petrol but it is a significant chunk of when we buy petrol is in fuel duty, but at least that depends upon what sort of car you are running, so if you are a businessman in your Bentley it doesn’t really matter, you will use a lot of petrol, but hey you pay a lot of duty, you can afford it, but if you are motoring on a budget you have probably got a small cheap to run car so you don’t use as much fuel, so you don’t pay as much duty. But road pricing affects all of us the same, the bloke in his Bentley just as it would somebody dropping their kids off at school and commuting into work as a nurse.
Prime Minister:
Well it depends what you do. You see the important thing about this debate is to understand not just why we are having it from the policy point of view, which is what do you do about congestion, you know how do you make your road network more effective for the amount you are going to have of it, because it can’t possibly keep pace with the number of cars that are going to come on to the road. So that is one debate as it were. But the other issue is really this, and it is very similar to the arguments about the electronic patient record in the Health Service, or identity cards, or whatever else it is, the issue is you have the technology now to be able to you know put a system in place where you are incentivising certain types of behaviour or not, and the question is you know you can decide to do this in a number of different ways, right, you could have all sorts of different ways of deciding how to do road pricing if you want a national scheme, and incidentally the national scheme is not what the Road Traffic Transport Act is introducing, it is just introducing these local experiments, but if you wanted to introduce a national scheme, and that as I say is some years in advance, you can decide to do that in whichever way you want, including taking account of income, where people live, whether you then amalgamate all the other taxes and get rid of all those and just have one single tax if you like.
Richard Hammond:
What, so you might get rid of the tax disc, you might get rid of tax duty on petrol?
Prime Minister:
Well one way you could do it is to say instead of having all these different taxes, right, because you have got your road tax and you have got your fuel duty and all the rest of it, you just have one thing which is the way that you raise the money, right, and you can raise it in all sorts of different ways. Now the reason why this debate is going on here and going on in other countries is because you will have the technology that allows you to do that, but how you decide to set up that system, that is a matter for policy makers in the future to work out.
Richard Hammond:
But could you guarantee though that there would be a commensurate job in the other ways in which we are taxed as motorists if something like road pricing came in?
Prime Minister:
Well this is the point Richard, you have got to take a policy decision. You could decide you were going to get rid of all the other taxes and just have that and you could decide that it is going to be revenue neutral. Now all these are policy decisions that you take in the future. The only issue at the moment is do you want to investigate this technology as a way of dealing with the problem both of congestion and of how you raise money for transport, do you want to do it or not? And you may decide at the end of it you don’t want to do it, but all I am saying at the moment is because you have got this additional dimension of congestion, as well as all the complexities of how you tax people in relation to transport, is it not sensible at least to investigate it?
Richard Hammond:
But as a means of solving congestion then, because you are saying that you will pay more, won’t you, under the schemes to travel at peak times, at rush hour, than you would in the middle of the afternoon?
Prime Minister:
Well if you did this, again there are a plethora of different ways that you can do it, but one way that you could do it, which is where you can pick up on the feasibility study from 2004 on this, is that you could charge very low amounts when you are travelling in the non-peak times and higher amounts when you are travelling at the peak times and you can do that if you want, or you might decide not to do it, but that is one way of doing it.
Richard Hammond:
But that sort of gets rid of, or it sounds like it might get rid of rush hours because it would stop us using it, to save money, because it is more expensive to drive, but why do we think there are rush hours anyway, because that is when we need to get to school and work, you can’t drop the kids off at 6.00 in the morning and let them sit in the sports hall until everybody else arrives?
Prime Minister:
Correct. But then that is the question of whether over time you actually want to take some of this and improve, you know this is where for example if you want to do it on a local basis you could decide that you are going to put ‘X’ amount of money in say to school transport, right, which is raised in this way. Do you see what I mean? There are all sorts of different ways you can do this.
Richard Hammond:
But it still wouldn’t solve the problem of if in the morning you have got to get to work, say you are a mother, you have got to drop your kids off at school and then get to the hospital where you work as a nurse, or an office or whatever, and you have to do it in time and you have to do that in the rush hour because that is that is when, nobody says I want to travel now because there is more traffic.
Prime Minister:
No, that is absolutely correct, but you see again you can find all sorts of ways of taking account of that. You know you can decide for example, I mean you don’t have to decide that you are going to treat all journeys in the same way, even through rush hour. Look the point that I am making is this. You could decide to use this technology in any way you want to do it. You know the first question is do you want to investigate its possibilities; the second question is, you can then decide, whatever policy considerations you make, and the important thing about a debate like this is you can see from the fact that 1.8 million people signed the petition, is that government is going to take a decision on this, and I suspect before you ever get to an election the electorate will want to know well what are the different parties proposing on this? Do you see what I mean? So the idea that you are going to come forward with some policy that is going to sort of, it is not going to happen like that. The idea is to engender a serious national debate about what the options are so that people can study them.
Richard Hammond:
And if people then continue, as they are now, to say we don’t like this particular option, will it happen?
Prime Minister:
Well as I say this is years in advance, but having gone through the fuel protest, I think it is highly unlikely that you will find politicians in the future putting something forward if people just are completely rebelling against it. On the other hand, you know it is important people know what the options are, because doing nothing I don’t think is an option.
Richard Hammond:
So let’s go through, just keeping going through these objections, because that is why so many people have said they don’t like it. Let’s talk about another issue that has been raised, and it is a broad one - privacy. You have said we have got the technology now, and the technology, I think you are talking about satellite tracking so that journeys can be tracked and recorded, when and where and on particular roads, and people have said well I don’t want that, I don’t want my journeys recorded.
Prime Minister:
Well again you can work out what way you want to do it and for example at the moment you will have tolls on certain roads for example that can be done reasonably easily, you know the question is would you be able to construct a system, and this is one of the issues, could you construct a system where people were sure that it was being used only for one specific notion, which is in order to charge you, rather than used for anything else?
Richard Hammond:
This is as in the data itself being protected once it was gathered, but you see I think it is easy to get carried away with that one, to think that is the big concern, and clearly yes you would worry that that information might be misused, but one, I don’t really imagine the government, any government, is ever going to sell off that information to double glazing companies so they would know when we are in and can ring and sell us some windows, so I don’t think that is the concern. Isn’t the concern more just the principle, that the information is gathered rather than what is done with it? I am not a spy so what I do isn’t very interesting, I am not worried what people might do with the information.
Prime Minister:
I agree that is going to be a big part of the debate, is there a way that you could make this work that people wouldn’t think you have got a sort of big brother satellite system tracking your every movement.
Richard Hammond:
But you have.
Prime Minister:
Well except that if you ended up with, I mean look I don’t know because the whole point about the technology, it is like this thing to do with the box in the car or not, is that necessary or not necessary, nobody knows at the moment. It could be, at the moment you have got a tax disc on your car, it could be that you could simply have a chip on the tax disc.
Richard Hammond:
But you are only talking then about the nature of what is, this is an awful emotive term to use, but I am going to say it, it’s a bug, it is saying here I am, so it is something that can be logged into and tracked by a satellite, isn’t it, whatever form it takes in the car.
Prime Minister:
The question is if it is information that is simply limited to the amount that you pay, I mean if the technology develops so that you could do that in a sufficient limited, particular and secure way, would people find that acceptable or not? I don’t know.
Richard Hammond:
I think they are indicating, and maybe they are indicating that they wouldn’t, and I certainly wouldn’t, and it is not to do with the information, is there anything that could be done with it, is useless, who wants to know when I take my kids to school or when I go to the office, it is not interesting …
Prime Minister:
… would they?
Richard Hammond:
Well it is the principle though. To make the system work surely it has to be identify our car, identify the journey and identify the roads used in the time, and I am not comfortable with that information being collected centrally.
Prime Minister:
But do you need all that to be collected in that way? I don’t know enough about the technology but surely if for example you are going through now to do, you know you are going through a toll, and some of these tolls, I think you were telling me that some of them you know you can literally just identify on the car and they know whether you have gone through it or not, that information is not kept centrally in the way that you are describing.
Richard Hammond:
But it must be. If you are talking about a system that charges for using particular stretches of road at particular times in a particular car, then it has to identify the time, the road and us, and therefore our journey. And many of us I think say I don’t want on principle that information … I don’t want to live in a country where that information is gathered about us …
Prime Minister:
Well you know if people in the end think that you can’t do this in a way that is acceptable to them, it won’t fly.
Richard Hammond:
But there is a principle here, certainly you have had the best people in the country no doubt making the report in the first instance that makes these claims about the way congestion is going to go, I still have personal doubts because I just imagine, if you were to buy a car in the future and not be able to get it out the end of your road because of congestion and simply sit there in a queue, why would you bother doing it? There is a self-righting element I imagine. But if your experts say that it is going to rise in the way that it is, I am sure it is.
Prime Minister:
Yes, but the point you are making again I understand, which is to say look in the end the market will go where the market goes.
Richard Hammond:
Well if you can’t move anywhere in a car, why would you use a car?
Prime Minister:
Right, but then the trouble with that is that it depends what your alternative is, and this is the point, which is why I find this so difficult. Because part of what you need to do is to raise money to invest in a better public transport system, because the best way of reducing congestion is if you have a better transport system, and so for example we were talking about school buses a moment or two ago, but I could name you about five different city schemes for metro links and so on, and light rail systems, and transit systems and so on, but you have got to raise money for all of these. And my point is this, that the trouble with transport, which is what makes it unlike virtually anything else, is that the lead times for building those systems are so great that you wouldn’t necessarily get this self-correcting mechanism that you are talking about very quickly.
Richard Hammond:
Doesn’t it also happen with transport, as perhaps you have experienced recently, that whenever issues like this are raised there is a very impassioned resonse almost immediately, it is not just from enthusiasts like me as an anorak who collects cars …
Prime Minister:
… the guy who went through the fuel protest and the country came to a halt.
Richard Hammond:
And also, in not very long, will kind of have his freedom back to a degree because you will be able to move around with the rest of us, rather than being burdened by the role.
Prime Minister:
Yes.
Richard Hammond:
And at that point you will find the same surely, won’t you find that the thought of having to be tracked, have your movements tracked, is somehow I would say the thin end of a wedge because you then might think there is a conspiracy theory coming your way, but there isn’t, but it does feel like the thin end of a wedge because a country in which we have to account for our movements to that extent, it is only a small step from that to thinking well what is the tag in the car, it is only like an electronic tag on an offender who wears that in order to prove that they are keeping to the terms of their parole, well we are rather using something similar on all of us to make the system work when we haven’t committed offences, we are just going about our lives?
Prime Minister:
Of course, but if you can’t find a suitable answer to that question, you know if you can’t, if the way that, because as I say there is no technology that can allow you to do this at the moment in a satisfactory way, and the reason we are doing these local schemes where you know you will need local consent to do these local schemes anyway, is to see if there is a way, and we are not the only country developing this type of thing, and when you can’t get an answer to your point, I think it is going to be very difficult to sell this. But I wouldn’t rule out the fact that if you could find an answer to it there was a satisfactory way that people didn’t feel that the notion of differential charging for the time of day you took your travel and so on, in other words you were trying to deal with this issue of congestion, if there was a way you could find round that, then I think people would at least look at that if the alternative was higher taxes for more public transport.
Richard Hammond:
But we can all appreciate, we are not stupid as a people, we can grasp the concept that if you have more cars than you have got room for, we all lose out, and so clearly yes ultimately congestion has to be resolved. But equally a system like this of road pricing, to make that work in any way it has to rely upon identifying us and the journeys we take for it to happen, and therefore that is one of the principles on which we are objecting.
Prime Minister:
Yes, no I totally understand that. And what I am saying to you is that I agree you need to find a reasonable answer to that, otherwise people will rebel against the system. And as I have just said to you, I think this is a classic example of something that you won’t be able to introduce unless people think well I can see that is fair. OK? However the point that I am making is, look I won’t be taking this decision, but I am simply saying this is a debate you need to start having in the years ahead because otherwise what is the alternative to dealing with this congestion? I mean if we swap seats for a moment, and you come into my seat and I am sitting in yours, what is the answer to the congestion?
Richard Hammond:
Oh if I came here with an answer to congestion I would be …
Prime Minister:
Prime Minister
Richard Hammond:
Running for office, yes we would be sitting in opposite seats. So I appreciate that. But what if we continue to object at this level, what if we continue to object on the grounds of privacy as well as expense and unfairness, and that doesn’t go away, and this particular way of tackling congestion we respond to it the same?
Prime Minister:
Yes, but you know the great thing, Richard, is we live in a democracy, and the fact that you guys have petitioned in 1.8 million, you know politicians sit up and take notice of that.
Richard Hammond:
But it has to count in terms of action, something has to happen otherwise you will just shout … at 1.8 million of us and nothing has happened? And where our contribution to this debate can’t, as the public, when we say we don’t like it, you are still saying it will count?
Prime Minister:
Of course it will count. You know we are in the business of politics of going out and winning support from people.
Richard Hammond:
But will it count in a way that means that this for instance, this plan, doesn’t happen?
Prime Minister:
Well you want me to rule it out now when the debate has just begun?
Richard Hammond:
No, no, but if the debate continues and you reach the point that it becomes crunch time …
Prime Minister:
Well as I said to you, I think this is a classic issue where if you cannot persuade people, you know although the danger often is in these arguments is you find there are two points of view, but the poll tax is a good example, in the end it didn’t matter whether it was the right or the wrong policy, the public just weren’t buying it. I mean I wouldn’t personally as a politician try to engage in that type of kamikaze politics, but what I do think is, and this is my insistence at the moment, I am not closing the door on the debate, I am not, I mean someone else may come along and close it, in which case you will be very happy, but I think it is a debate you need to have. Now I agree with all the points that you have made, the one that gives any sensible person pause for thought is this privacy issue around it, you know it is how much information do you want, what is it going to be used for, what is really going on here? And I think you need to find a way of answering that question, you know. But there may be ways of answering it, and one of the things that will happen with this technology as it develops is that you know there will be all sorts of different ways of doing it, but in the end with an issue like this, if you can’t take people with you, you know they will just close the door. And politicians are in the business of trying to win elections, not lose them, and that is why it is …
Richard Hammond:
Well no doubt then it is a debate that will continue until a decision is made, and we will continue to have our input into it, as will the politicians.
Prime Minister:
Yes, yes, and that is the sensible thing. And one of the reasons why I think it is good that you know we are doing this, that we have had the petition thing, is you know let it all hang out, let the debate happen. Because sometimes what happens is that both sides adjust, you know we may adjust, you may end up thinking well there is merit in maybe this way of trying to do something like this, but not in that, you know.
Richard Hammond:
Well we shall see what happens.
Prime Minister:
At the moment you are not yet persuaded.
Richard Hammond:
… I have to say. But thank you for talking to me and thank you for letting me join in the debate.