Outer London Congestion Charge

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms Rees.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) for securing this timely and important debate, and I speak in it as a Member whose constituency is right on the edge of outer London, just inside the boundary.

The proposal by Sadiq Khan to impose an outer London boundary tax is one of the silliest ideas that he has come up with in the past five years. Some of his defenders have said that it is about improving air quality, but that is nonsense. This proposal has absolutely nothing to do with improving air quality.

Transport for London knows where the bad air is in London; indeed, it has published the analysis it made when considering the creation of the ultra-low emission zone some years ago and it is still available for anyone who wishes to see it. That analysis is in the form of a heat map, which shows the bad areas for air quality inside Greater London. Unsurprisingly, they are around central London, around Heathrow airport and on some of the trunk roads into and out of London. Where the bad air demonstrably is not is in outer London.

This proposal is, purely and simply, a revenue-raising exercise. Since the Mayor will aim it squarely at people who do not live inside Greater London and who therefore have no say or vote in the matter, it is—as my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford has said—effectively “taxation without representation”. There is a huge democratic deficit here.

However, just because the people forced to pay this charge do not live in Greater London does not mean that it will not have an impact on those who do live inside Greater London. As other hon. Members have said, this proposal would deliver a hammer blow to outer London’s businesses. They rely on suppliers and customers driving in from outside the local area to shop and work, and this measure would jeopardise people’s livelihoods and our recovery from the pandemic.

It is not just those working in or using our local businesses who will be impacted. Those who provide our public services will also be hit; 51% of Metropolitan police officers and 52% of London firefighters live outside the Greater London boundary. They work shifts and often have to drive to work, as do almost 3,000—more than one in five—of the employees of my local NHS trust.

A few weeks ago, I wrote to headteachers in all the schools in my Orpington constituency, to seek their views on the charge and to find out how many of their staff and pupils would be impacted by it. A great many have written back to me, all of them expressing serious concerns about the detrimental impact it would have. A common concern has been the impact it would have on teacher recruitment and retention. One headteacher commented: “For us as a school this equates to 40% of our teaching and leadership staff and 33% of our administrative staff. To penalise staff by imposing a £3.50 daily charge would undoubtedly add financial pressure to individuals, but would also negatively affect recruitment from Greater London boroughs such as Bromley. I honestly believe that if this proposal is to go ahead, it will have a profound effect on recruiting and retaining staff in Greater London boroughs. Some of these staff are young, who took advantage of relatively lower housing costs to purchase outside the Greater London area. For them and others, this additional daily cost will be particularly hard. There is no serious public transport alternative to use, and therefore this will be a severe blow to those who are impacted. It will feel like a tax on work.”

Another observed: “For our full-time staff the additional cost will be like a salary reduction of £1,000 per annum. This will make us less competitive in terms of recruitment relative to schools in Kent and Surrey, or those who have public transport close by. This potentially would result in some families not being able to afford to bring their children into school, some of whom are deemed vulnerable children.”

Finally, I had a letter unprompted from another constituent. It is worth quoting this at length: “I am a teacher. I have taught in Orpington for 22 years. This charge will affect me and other workers every single day. This charge might be appropriate for inner London, where there are alternative means of transport, but that is not true here. We do not have a good, reliable bus service. We do not have the tube. With a newly unemployed husband and a family, this is a cost I just can’t bear and one that is grossly unfair, given the lack of available alternative public transport. I doubt Orpington High Street and the Nugent retail park will survive if shoppers from Swanley, Dartford and other surrounding areas put off by the charge cease to come.”

Sadiq Khan has been Mayor of London for five years, and for most of that time City Hall has been an achievement-free zone. There has been lots of virtue signalling, a good deal of showboating, and lots of finger pointing and blame shifting, but in terms of the core deliverables—building houses, running a transport system and keeping people safe—the past five years have been marked by ignominious failure. One thing that he has said has struck a chord, however. His “London is open” slogan is a sentiment that previously united Londoners and the surrounding areas, but introducing such a proposal shows how empty that slogan is. London is not open if people are taxed whenever they attempt to enter it.

There is no denying that under Sadiq Khan’s leadership, TfL’s debt has risen to record levels, key infrastructure projects have been delayed or cancelled, the delivery of Crossrail has been bungled, and hundreds of millions of pounds of potential income have been thrown away on pet projects. It is simply not acceptable for him to look to recover his losses by imposing a damaging border tax. He should drop this silly proposal immediately. If he refuses, I will call on the Government, in common with colleagues, to remove his power to impose it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sam Tarry]

It is clear at the moment that the key issue we want to focus on is a long-term funding deal for TfL, which would mean such options would not need to be considered. That is perhaps something on which we could all agree. I again point out that there would be no need whatsoever for a Greater London boundary charge if the Government supported the calls from the Mayor of London to allow the capital to keep its share of the vehicle excise duty, which is roughly £500 million a year.

If we gave TfL the level of revenue in capital funding it had for the first 20 years of its existence, that would be a game changer. Let us not forget that it is the current Prime Minister, the previous Mayor of London, who negotiated away the direct operating subsidy in 2015. That ensured that the brutal austerity measures of the then Chancellor George Osborne, inflicted on councils and the rest of the public sector from 2010, were also applied to Transport for London, literally robbing our country’s transport Crown jewels in front of the eyes of Londoners.

Let us focus on vehicle excise duty for a moment. Every year, Londoners pay £500 million in VED, money which is spent almost exclusively on roads outside of London. We, therefore, have the nonsensical situation whereby road maintenance in London is in effect subsidised by people using public transport. To put that another way, tube users pay for car drivers. I would like to know if the Minister agrees that City Hall should be allowed to keep the VED.

[Gareth Bacon]

Will the hon. Gentleman concede that people do not just use one mode of transport? Car drivers also walk, cycle and use public transport, so they pay into the public transport system. The idea that car drivers are being subsidised by public transport users is further undermined by more than a £1 billion of subsidy that Transport for London puts into the bus system and the other concessionary fares. Would he concede that that statement, which is often used and comes directly from City Hall, is misleading and wrong?

[Sam Tarry]

I think of lot of Londoners will disagree. Their money is spent elsewhere in the country. As I have said in the Chamber before, it would be good to see an agenda not of levelling down London, but genuinely levelling up the rest of the country’s transport networks, as needs to happen. As I was saying, I would like to hear whether the Minister agrees that City Hall should be allowed to keep that VED, which is paid by Londoners, so that it can be spent on their transport system. That seems only fair, given that London contributes over £40 billion net to Treasury coffers every single year.

Does the Minister agree that allowing London to keep its share of VED, so that TfL can invest in London’s roads and public transport services, is actually a very reasonable request, not least given the fact that the Conservative party at City Hall has supported that very position in a cross-party letter? Indeed, the hon. Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon is on the record as having previously supported that position.

[Gareth Bacon]

The letter to which the hon. Gentleman refers was written before this proposal was put in place, and this is not an either/or question. The Mayor of London is throwing up smoke and mirrors by saying that either vehicle excise duty is devolved or there is an outer-London charge. That is not the case at all. As chairman of the cross-party budget committee, I was obliged to sign that letter because the majority of the committee said that they wanted vehicle excise duty to be devolved, but that was before the Mayor of London called for this, so the two things are not related at all.