Outer London Congestion Charge

Gareth Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the proposal for an outer London congestion charge.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees. I am very grateful to have secured the debate. The Mayor of London’s proposal to charge drivers to enter Greater London would have a catastrophic impact on places like Dartford and all the areas surrounding London. It would also have a detrimental impact on outer London boroughs. Businesses located in outer London boroughs would suffer from people being reluctant to travel the—often short—distance across the border to use that particular business.

That would have an impact on drycleaners, pubs, takeaways, shops, hairdressers and more. Those are the exact same businesses that have been hardest hit as a consequence of covid. The Mayor of London’s financial stability plan, which was published in January, proposes a seven-days-a-week charge of £3.50 for all motorists using a vehicle registered outside Greater London, rising to £5.50 for the most polluting vehicles.

Sadiq Khan is looking at building a literal financial wall between London and its neighbours. The proposal would divide communities and set London against all others. It is a border tax that has been called various things: Checkpoint Chigwell, Labour’s Dartford car tax, and many other things that are unrepeatable in this Chamber.

More than 26,000 people have signed a petition against Labour’s Dartford car tax, and I pay tribute to Tom Oliver and Kyle Stealey in my constituency who have organised that. The Mayor of London claims he needs to do this to offset the fact that Londoners cannot keep the £500 million per year they pay in road tax. However, no other area gets to keep the road tax they pay either. Although it is true that Highways England does not own a great number of roads in London, it does not have many roads in some other areas too; London is not alone in that.

Is the Mayor of London claiming that Londoners do not drive on motorways? Of course they do, and of course those have to be paid for. It is as if the Mayor of London is saying, with this proposal, “Give me even more money, or look what I can do. I can ruin you. I can hit you financially and make you pay if I don’t get my way.” That is effectively what the Mayor of London is saying. This proposal sends out the clear message that far from London being open, as the Mayor claims, it will be very much closed for motorists entering the capital.

It is laudable for any mayor to lobby for more funding, and I fully understand why Sadiq Khan wants to raise more finances. Every mayor around the country is trying to do the same thing, but it should not be attempted on the back of blackmail that says, “Give me money, or I will ruin you.” He is saying, “I will charge you to visit loved ones. I will charge you to drop somebody off at the local railway station. I will charge you to use London’s small businesses, and I will charge you just for driving out of your road.” That is not laudable; it is an abuse of power.

The border around London is not neat, and does not run along major routes. Instead, it straddles residential roads. In Dartford, for example, there are residential roads that are located in Kent and it is not possible to drive out of them without entering the London Borough of Bexley. We have a number of roads like that and there are also roads where the border literally goes down the middle of the road, so someone drives out of the road in Kent and back into it in London. We have a park home situated in Kent, and the only exit from it is in the London Borough of Bexley. Each of those journeys by a motorist would, of course, incur the proposed charge.

Many of my constituents would therefore face paying at least £3.50 a day just to drive out of their own roads. The proposal is for the charge to apply seven days a week, so hundreds of my constituents will pay over £1,200 a year just to be able to drive out of the road where they live: £1,200 a year just to get out of the house. For thousands of others, it would mean a £3.50 charge just to visit loved ones, to drop a child off at school, to visit a hospital, or to go to work. So many frontline workers in London live in neighbouring counties. These are the people who keep London functioning. They too will be hit with this charge.

I would argue that integration along the border between Kent and London is currently excellent, but the Mayor of London wants to change that. He wants to levy a charge on people, yet he is unaccountable to those people. The people who would have to pay the daily charge cannot vote him out or do anything to stop the charge, and he knows it. It is taxation without representation, taxation without accountability, and it needs to be stopped.

Dartford is not part of London. We are proud of our Kentish heritage. Yet many people who are now Dartfordians used to live in London. Many of us commute to London—obviously, I am one of those people. There is a good relationship with London and with the neighbouring counties, but the Mayor of London wants to change that. He wants to set London against its neighbours, but in doing so he damages not just the people who live outside London, but the people who live in London.

Businesses in outer London will see so many of their customers put off spending money at their establishments because it will be too expensive to travel to them. No wonder YouGov found that the majority of Londoners—Londoners—oppose the proposed charge. It is claimed that the opposition to the proposal is timed to marry up with the London mayoral elections. Actually, the proposal’s timing is completely down to the Mayor of London. He decided when to announce the proposal; he is responsible for the timing and he published it in a document just the month before last. So it is hardly surprising that we are having the debate at this time. It is hardly surprising that, come March, we are now talking about the issue.

If the proposal goes ahead, it will have the most profound impact on Dartford of any governmental action. It will be taken by somebody who Dartfordians have absolutely no control over. The London Mayor knows that the ring of seats around London, with the exception of Slough, are Conservative. He also knows that, generally, outer London areas—there are some exceptions—are more likely to vote Conservative than inner London seats. He knows who he is hitting with this idea. It is the most divisive issue ever conceived by a London Mayor and it needs to be stopped. It will have a profound impact, not just on the counties around London, but on the outer London boroughs. It is an abuse of power and it needs to end.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

I intend to call the Opposition spokesperson at 3.38 pm at the latest. If speakers confine themselves to seven minutes or less, we should get everyone in. I call Adam Holloway.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sam Tarry (Ilford South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms Rees, and I thank the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) for securing this timely debate. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), who exposed the real situation and raised genuine concerns about air cleanliness and air quality, and my neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), who laid bare the facts of what is really a Tory transport delusion.

I note that the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) said that London’s electoral system is rigged in favour of Labour. The two terms served there by our current Prime Minister might point in the opposite direction. Indeed, TfL’s financial woes began under that previous Mayor of London. Perhaps the issue is that the current Tory candidate is about to get crushed in the upcoming election.

I would like to thank the hon. Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway) who showed his fantastic choice of tie and Windsor knot skills. Unfortunately, he shed very little light on the facts of the debate. The hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), as a military man, will surely see this debacle from the Department for Transport and the Government for what it is: a political improvised explosive device designed to blow up the Mayor of London.

What we have heard today is nothing more than a highly politicised attack on the Mayor of London, just weeks before the mayoral election. Far from being wasteful, the Mayor has been held over a barrel by the Government and forced to consider any and every option left available in order to keep afloat one of the world’s greatest transport networks. The fact that it has reached this point is frankly shameful.

I hope we will hear from the Minister whether the Government will finally give a long-term funding commitment to TfL, or keep stringing it along with piecemeal funding that serves only to kick the can down the road until a meaningful agreement is reached. Perhaps that is why so many Conservative MPs are here today. Perhaps they, too, would like to see the Government do the right thing, rather than simply using the Government’s chronic underfunding of TfL in the middle of a pandemic as a stick to beat the London Mayor with.

I will address some of the fundamentally misleading statements that we have heard today. First, the proposal for an outer London congestion charge is far from set in stone. TfL is currently in the process of carrying out an early feasibility study; no decisions have yet been taken to implement the charge. If a decision were taken to pursue the idea, clearly an extensive public consultation and detailed economic and environmental impact assessments would have to be undertaken.

[Gareth Johnson]

If the London Mayor were to implement this outer London congestion charge, would the Labour party support it?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Johnson]

My thanks to you, Ms Rees, for chairing this debate. May I also thank everybody who has contributed? It has been a constructive debate, with much of it centring on whether or not TfL and the Mayor of London are properly financed. Even if one concedes—which I do not—that they are not properly financed, this is not the right route to go down in order to raise funding. It is hugely divisive. It sets community against community and sets London against the others. It will create a literal financial wall right around London’s border. It is totally wrong.

If this policy is implemented, I wish businesses and public sector organisations in the outer London boroughs good luck in recruiting staff. We need to do everything we can to prevent it from being implemented. Raising revenue from people whom to whom the Mayor is totally unaccountably is the wrong way to raise taxation. It is taxation without representation; it is taxation without accountability.

That is why it is a fundamentally poor policy that has been ill thought through and will be devastating to my constituents and to ordinary people in Dartford and around the south-east who are just going about their daily business, going into London to visit friends and loved ones and to work and shop. Those are the people who will be hardest hit by this proposed charge, and that is why it is fundamentally wrong.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the proposal for an outer London congestion charge.