Road User Charging Schemes

Gareth Johnson Excerpts

Monday 26th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I want to make a short speech about this issue, which has a profound impact on my Dartford constituency. In many ways, places outside London are in a very different situation compared with constituencies inside London. We do not vote the London Mayor in or out, so this is taxation without any accountability or representation, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) rightly said. Decisions are being imposed on people in Dartford without any say from the people of Dartford. That is not democracy, yet that is what is happening.

That is the case right across the doughnut area around London, where the Mayor’s scrappage scheme does not apply. Nor should it apply, because where would we draw the line? Right up to Manchester or Rochester? We cannot have a situation in which the general taxpayer has to pick up the bill for the Mayor of London’s financial incompetence. It is therefore right that we do not have the scrappage scheme outside London. Even in London, the scrappage scheme payments are up to £2,000. Show me a ULEZ-compliant car that can be bought for up to £2,000—there are hardly any out there.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

Right now in Labour-controlled boroughs, such as my borough of Waltham Forest, they are trying to build tower blocks. They will not allow any car parking except for those with disability certificates. That means that even if someone does get the right car, they will not be allowed to park in London. It is an attack on the whole idea of the motor car, whether it is electric or using carbon fuel sources.

[Gareth Johnson]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a lack of joined-up thinking about how we approach motor vehicles, and we all know that the Mayor of London has an anti-car mentality. The impact is going to be on people not just outside of London, in places such as Dartford, but in areas of outer London that fall within the zone. There will be an impact on businesses: people in my constituency are not going to travel to them, as it will cost them £12.50. One in seven of my constituents who own vehicles will be hit by the charge.

The charge will also affect public services in London. Something like 50% of all Metropolitan police officers live outside of London, and I am sure it is a similar figure for paramedics and firefighters. That group of people is going to have to pay £12.50 to come into London in order to work and keep running the services that Londoners rely on. It is not just £12.50; if they are doing a night shift, they will be hit twice. It will be 25 quid to do a night shift. We are talking about the people who Londoners rely on the most.

[Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for the campaigning he has done against the expansion of ULEZ. Like him, I am Kent MP; he will know that KentOnline did a freedom of information request, and found that the last expansion of ULEZ saw 78,000 people in Kent fined within a year. Over 16,000 people in Medway were fined.

I am now being contacted by residents who are having to travel into Bexley, which years ago was in Kent, not Greater London. It is frustrating for my local residents to understand how the Labour London Mayor has an impact on an area that we used to believe to be Kent and not London. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that we should do all we can in Kent to ensure we are supporting our London colleagues to stop this crazy money-grabbing scheme by the Mayor?

[Gareth Johnson]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why it has been so good that Kentish MPs have been working with our distant cousins from across the border in the smoky town. These are hon. Friends who, over this issue, would quite like to be in Kent—but we will not let them.

It is important that we make the point about the penalty notices. Income from penalty notices has been factored in by the Mayor of London in the overall budgeting for this. The Mayor relies on people forgetting to pay, or not knowing that they have to pay. That is part of the impact that the Mayor is placing on us.

As has been said a few times in this debate, the charging scheme is not about air quality. That is the façade that has been used. In Dartford we have poor air quality. We suffer from the impacts of westerly winds and the Dartford crossing, and as a consequence we have poor air quality. Therefore, if it was about air quality, I would be one of the first people to be sympathetic, but it is not about that. If it was about air quality, Sadiq Khan would be banning vehicles from London. He does not want to ban them; he just wants to make money out of them—and he needs to make a certain amount.

We know that the London underground is far more polluted than the air on the streets, yet the policy will force more people to use the underground and so suffer a bigger impact because of the quality of the air they will be breathing. The scheme has absolutely nothing to do with air quality. At the moment, the Mayor of London is doing away with our daily travel cards, which again pushes more people on to the London underground, where the air quality is far worse.

[Gareth Bacon]

At recent public meetings, the Mayor of London equated the expansion of the ultra low emission zone to the banning of smoking in pubs. Would my hon. Friend agree that the banning of smoking in pubs was not subject to a £12.50 charge—as if someone paying £12.50 would not be polluting the air in the pub while smoking? The comparison between the two is completely and utterly bonkers.

[Gareth Johnson]

Absolutely. It is also fair to say that in any consultations that took place at the time, the majority of people were in favour of banning smoking in pubs. Even if we accept wholeheartedly what the Mayor of London has said about the consultation process, we know that a majority of people do not support the ULEZ expansion. It was a sham consultation. What is the point in having a consultation and totally ignoring its outcome? There are lots of rumours that the cameras were bought before it took place, and that therefore there was never any chance of Sadiq Khan rolling back on the policy. He was hellbent on expanding the ULEZ no matter what anybody said, and no matter what the outcome.

What we have not heard is Sadiq Khan saying that he will not move the goalposts. I firmly believe that he has in mind the fact that he has to earn a certain amount of money to pay for the infrastructure that he will put in—£250 million, for a start—and to fill the black hole in his finances. If too many people switch to compliant vehicles, he will move the goalposts, so the next category of vehicles will no longer be ULEZ compliant, until all petrol and diesel cars are not compliant and are therefore charged. The Mayor of London has not ruled that out, and I firmly believe that it will happen. This is not the end, but the beginning.

[Mr Francois]

My hon. Friend said earlier that it is one thing when Kent MPs co-operate with London MPs; it is another when Essex MPs join in too. Does he agree that TfL has effectively been bankrupt for years and is kept going only with central Government subsidy? While the Mayor pays lip service to air quality, this is a tax grab, pure and simple. It is not about air quality; it is about money.

[Gareth Johnson]

My hon. Friend from across the river is absolutely right. I am delighted that Essex MPs and Kent MPs have been working together on this. All MPs who have an inch of fairness about them have been doing so. It speaks volumes that not a single Labour Back Bencher has turned up. They are intimidated. When I speak to Labour MPs privately about the policy, they despair. That is why they are not present. They have no comeback and no answer, and they do not want to be here, embarrassed by this policy, which is supported by the leadership of the Labour party.

I will make one final point. For a party that claims that it wants to look after the poorest in society, this policy will do exactly the opposite: it will hit the poorest the most. It will not hit the rich, powerful and wealthy; it will hit people who have vehicles that are quite old and that they cannot afford to upgrade, and small businesses that have two or three non-compliant vehicles and are therefore unable to upgrade them. The charge will hit people who cannot afford to pay it, and who will therefore despair and contact their Members of Parliament. Scores of them have done so on a weekly basis, desperately trying to work out what on earth they can do about a policy that they have no control over—no vote over, in the case of people Dartford—and simply cannot afford.

This is a cruel form of taxation on people in the south-east. It is something that the Labour party should be thoroughly ashamed of. They should be thoroughly ashamed of their London Mayor.