Road Pricing

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Young of Cookham]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to introduce road pricing.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have no plans to introduce road pricing.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

That short reply will allow lots of time for questions. Three years ago, the Transport Select Committee in another place produced a unanimous report on road pricing. The committee’s chair said:

“It’s time for an honest conversation on motoring taxes”,


and the committee called on the Government to “act now” to avoid a £35 billion “fiscal black hole”—something we know the Minister disapproves of. As electric vehicles become the norm, fuel duty revenue will fall away. That can be made good by road pricing based on the distance a motorist travels, the time and the place. Modern technology makes that possible. It would reduce congestion and make better use of our railways. By the way, the Minister’s Treasury colleague, Torsten Bell, has written a publication strongly supporting road pricing, so might he have a conversation with him?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. As I said, the Government have no plans to introduce road pricing. As he will know, we need to balance several objectives: we must always ensure fiscal stability and sustainability, as he indicates; motoring must remain affordable for consumers; and we must support the decarbonisation of the transport sector. Achieving these objectives means that we need to take a balanced approach. As the noble Lord may know, electric vehicles are now in scope of vehicle excise duty, raising an additional £1.6 billion every year by the end of this Parliament. We have set the rates for company car tax to gradually normalise the taxation of electric vehicles. At the same time, in the last Budget we extended the temporary 5p fuel duty cut and cancelled the planned increase in line with inflation. Meanwhile, we are maintaining incentives for people to buy new electric vehicles, including investing £650 million in the electric car grant and £400 million to roll out charging infrastructure.