MPs urge review of road pricing role
- Published: 12 June 2008 16:31
- Author: Mark Smulian
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- Last Updated: 13 June 2008 11:53
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The government should rethink its requirement that councils can only get money from the £2.5bn transport innovation fund by adopting road pricing, a parliamentary report has said.
MPs on the commons transport committee said in their annual review of the Department for Transport's work that the fund was too small for more than a few projects to go ahead and the rules "might prevent a broad range of towns and city regions from exploring the best solutions to local congestion problems".
Lack of appetite for bids
It added that there was "little evidence to suggest that local authorities have the appetite for submitting the necessary bids and securing TIF support". And the committee doubted that local road pricing schemes could provide effective pilots for a national scheme, even were they to go ahead.
The MPs also criticised the local transport plan process as "excessively complex" and said that some councils that made successful bids for projects in these plans might be left unable to afford the borrowing costs.
They also criticised the department's "continued failure to deliver on road congestion targets", and noted that it was unlikely to secure its target of a 12% increase in bus use in every region by 2010 against 2000 levels.
