The road to recovery
Page 9
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• The government should pay heed to the warning that its ro-Year Transport Plan is ineffective— particularly as it comes from no less an organisation than the Institute of Directors.
Already a year has slipped by within the 10-year timeframe without any tangible relief to our congestion problems, despite the many promises about road improvements, bypasses and greater use of rail.
Whether the IoD's proposals would help is debatable. While the very mention of a reduction in fuel duty will get any haulier's attention, the fact that the loD wants this tied in with extensive road charging will leave him less enthusiastic. After all, it would be difficult and unpopular to introduce widespread road pricing schemes to charge people for using roads that remain poorly maintained, badly congested or simply too small for the volume of traffic they need to carry.
Labour simply must deliver tangible improvements during its second term of government if it wants to stay on the right side of the UK electorate, and that will mean making significant improvements to Britain's roads—preferably before trying to charge the public and British business for using them.
• Maybe it's no surprise that new Transport Minister John Spellar follows the government line on fuel tax (see page io). But it will still disappoint many that he can offer no real explanation for the unjustifiably high price of fuel in Britain. Instead, he reiterates the old argument that the overall tax burden is roughly the same on both sides of the Channel, even though all the evidence is that hauliers abroad are taxed between 4-10% less than their UK counterparts. The names may change at the DoT but the game, it seems, remains the same.