Clean Air Zones Central Services (Fees) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

At end insert “but that this House regrets that the draft Regulations will increase the fee payable in respect of clean air zone payments processed through the central services website from £2 to £4; risk additional costs being passed on to motorists who are already facing high fuel costs; fail to provide sufficient assurance that drivers will be protected from any direct or indirect increase in clean air zone charges; and extend the charging period until 31 March 2031 despite the continuing financial pressure on motorists.”

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I start by saying that if the purpose of the recent changes in procedure for dealing with statutory instrument regret amendments and fatal amendments was to limit the scrutiny applied to government instruments, it has already proved very successful. What we see is that there are three speakers in this debate and they are all from the Front Benches. I suggest that the use of the list system for this purpose is already showing signs of failure. That remark of course is not addressed to the Minister, who is not responsible for the change, but I think it is important that it should be said.

I take as my starting point what the Minister said about the fuel duty. He claimed credit for not increasing the fuel duty in a way that was envisaged by the Treasury, but that occurred only because of a sustained and effective campaign led by the Conservative Party. The Government were embarrassed into falling back on that because of those efforts. It is wrong that they should claim credit for it. Any motorist who thought they might be able to relax in the light of that circumstance obviously has to think again because we now have, in effect, another stealth tax on motorists.

The instrument doubles the fee paid by local authorities to the Secretary of State for each clean air zone payment—namely, every trip that incurs a clean air zone payment charge—that is processed through the central service. That is for all the cities mentioned by the Minister; I believe that London is not part of that system, but all the other cities that he mentioned certainly are. It doubles that from £2 to £4. The Government are trying to get away with that as a cost recovery item, and they say that they do not expect it to be passed on to motorists by local authorities.

But, if you take the case of Birmingham, for example, where the daily charge is £8, this is now fully half of the fee. Of course this is significant, and local authorities will seek to recover it one way or the other. The Minister says that they do not need to do that because local authorities are generating a surplus—it is true that many of them are—and he imagines that local authorities just sit there with the surplus in the bank smiling at it and counting it as it accumulates. But in fact those surpluses are used for desperately needed transport improvements in their cities. So, if they are to be told, “You can’t pass it on and you will have a smaller surplus to spend”, something will have to give—and it will be local transport improvements. In fact, that is very unlikely because those expenditure plans, which are often laid several years in advance, will require funding, and that funding will no longer be available from this source, so it will come out of the motorist’s pocket.

I appreciate that today the Minister copied me into his letter to the chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and he has explained the levels of cost recovery that are now expected as a result of this measure being implemented. But there is no transparency, and nothing has been offered to us to show that the central system is operating efficiently or that it needs fully half the revenue from the fee. It will not be half in every city, admittedly—it is half in Birmingham because the fee is £8, and in Bath it is £9—but it is approximately half. Fully half of the fee, or approximately that, is being snaffled for a processing system when it could be spent—and is being spent—on necessary and important improvements.

The burden of these fees, and the increase that I feel confident in saying will ensue, does not fall evenly. The vehicles that fail to qualify for these clean air zones are typically older vehicles likely to be owned by people on lower incomes, older motorists and so forth. This is not an abstract consideration about clean air; it affects people’s lives.

The clean air zones themselves should wind up in the very near future. They are, after all, a measure that work only if they achieve a certain objective within a certain timeframe. But we now find that the other effect of this instrument is that they are being extended out as far as 2031. The reality is that this is almost certainly redundant already. The vehicles that qualify for these charges are disappearing from the streets; that is happening simply through the passage of time and the fact that older vehicles are taken out of the fleet. I imagine that it could very easily be the case that the same effect could be achieved by 2031 as keeping these charges in place is likely to achieve.

We have all heard cases in the past where the Government have said that there will be a charge that will be levied for a certain period and then it will fall away. When the time comes for it to fall away, it is extended or kept in place, and sometimes it is even made permanent. The Government have more regard for their own finances—that is the simple fact—than they do for the life of the motorist. They should be ashamed of what they are doing. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is not a revenue-raising measure, the Minister says—unless you are the Department for Transport, which will raise the revenue to cover its costs, as that is the prime directive it is following.

It has been a useful debate. There is little to be superadded to it at this stage. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment withdrawn.