Highways (Financing) Bill

Olly Glover Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 15th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

I start by welcoming the Minister to his place. He has been blessed with the opportunity to bring another scintillating transport Bill to this House, which has clearly excited a very large number of hon. Members.

Starting with the Minister’s comments about the lower Thames crossing, which is clearly a major reason why this legislation has been laid, he is quite right to say that there is a clear need to relieve pressure on the Dartford crossings that connect the two ends of the M25 across the Thames. However, it is interesting that we seem to be assuming that traffic growth is inevitable, which is an assumption that the Government were not quite so willing to make when they opposed passenger growth targets in the Railways Bill. I make that point purely because although we of course need to cater for future increases in road demand, there is also a lot we can do to transfer that demand—both passenger and freight—to other transport modes, particularly for long-distance traffic.

In that context, while the lower Thames crossing has merit in that it will relieve the existing Thames crossings, the Government appear to be repeating the mistake of many past Labour and Conservative Governments by seeing road building as the sole answer and neglecting rail infrastructure. The channel tunnel is one of the engineering wonders of the world, yet it continues to be under-utilised, especially for rail freight—in fact, largely the rail freight does not exist, beyond lorries going on LeShuttle or whatever it is called this week. Channel tunnel use charges are one of the barriers; another is the capabilities of the UK rail network within Kent. There are well-developed plans for upgrades to the Kent conventional rail network to accommodate W12 loading gauge freight trains, and intentions to create a freight hub served by High Speed 1 at Barking, which would benefit from acceleration.

As drafted, the Bill would also give the Government significant powers to impose road tolls and charges on major roads. Introducing a new financing model for the strategic road network, while the local roads that make up 99% of the country’s roads in terms of length are facing an £18 billion repairs backlog, is an interesting choice by the Government, but let us engage directly with that choice.

There are examples of the concept of tolls and charges working well both here and abroad. Many choose to use the M6 toll road instead of the M6 despite there being a fee to pay, because it reduces some of the “road to hell” experience that the M6 often is for many. In France, motorway tolls are common, if not universal, and many European countries use a vignette system, where a driver pays for a sticker, or a digital version of that, to go on their vehicle, which enables them to use motorways and trunk roads. The advantage is that people who want to use motorways and trunk roads pay a little bit more for those roads, but people who use their car only for very local purposes do not have to pay that cost.

[Mr Holden]

Would the hon. Member accept that the Bill allows for exactly what we see in France, which is toll roads across the entire strategic road network?

[Olly Glover]

Not all French motorways are tolled. Certain sections of them are—often the busiest sections. I will come to what the right hon. Gentleman said about what the Bill does and does not do.

The Liberal Democrats’ position is that there needs to be close attention to the detail and scrutiny of the way in which charges and tolls—like those in Europe and on the M6, which I mentioned—are implemented. However, the Bill leaves all of those questions of operation, management, oversight and regulation of tolls and charges largely undefined; they are often relegated to secondary legislation. The Government must ensure that road users are not held to ransom by licence holders, who must be properly regulated. We have seen disastrous effects in other sectors when these things have been got wrong.

The Minister and the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) gave good examples of how a regulated asset base approach, and indeed private finance initiatives, can be used for good, but of course there are many bad examples as well. I am not sure whether too many people believe that the water industry’s use of the regulated asset base approach has been enormously successful. We certainly need regulation of private investors and to ensure that the triggers for the special administration regime defined in the legislation are not too weak. Of course, there are also many examples of public private partnerships and private finance initiatives that have not ended well, particularly with hospitals and the London underground.

[Mr Francois]

The hon. Member is making a very thoughtful speech. I was recently on a private holiday in Texas, being driven by a friend. In that state, there is a number of toll roads, so people have a chip attached to the windscreen that allows them to transition from public roads, as it were, to toll roads and back again, with that chip recording what they have to pay as they go from one to the other. The technology to do this already exists—I saw it with my own eyes. We are just a bit worried that the Government might be a bit too keen to adopt it.

[Olly Glover]

The right hon. Gentleman is right to say that if we are to go down that road, it needs to be transparent and done in a way that gives confidence to consumers. Car drivers and road users are consumers, and we should think of them in the same way we do customers on the railway or on planes. If such a thing is to be done, it must be done with great care and thought. That is why we need to scrutinise the legislation carefully.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Such schemes are hardly new: in London, we have had the congestion charge for many years now—[Interruption.] We have it elsewhere, too; drivers in and around our major cities are used to a charge they have to include in their budgets.

[Olly Glover]

Yes, London is another example of where some of these things are already happening, but the fact that they have been controversial at times is exactly why they need to be done with thought and, ideally, in a manner that avoids some of the interminable cultural wars that we must always have on every topic these days. Instead, they should be done with consensus and based on sound reason and analysis.

We are not satisfied that the Bill as drafted provides that transparency and accountability, so we will not take a view on it as a whole today. We hope that the Government will be more receptive to some of our ideas to improving the Bill at later Commons stages than perhaps they have been hitherto.