Highways (Financing) Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Olly Glover and Greg Smith

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Olly Glover]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. Amendment 39 would create a mechanism for compulsory compensation for local councils as a result of additional traffic due to people avoiding tolls.

Local council taxpayers must not be forced to subsidise private toll road profits by picking up the repair bill for local roads damaged by heavy diverted traffic. As Declan Pang of the Road Haulage Association noted in front of the Committee last week, local A and B roads are heavily used by small businesses and hauliers, and severe wear caused by toll evasion can hurt the wider local economy.

Placing compensation in clause 7 would make it a binding legal condition so that private operators cannot bypass or negotiate away the wider impacts. One of the reasons I have tabled the amendment is because of the problem with the current roads funding formula. It is based overwhelmingly on miles rather than use levels. Higher use of existing roads would not necessarily lead to more funding for local authorities as a result, so we need a mechanism to deal with that.

Amendment 40 would, in effect, extend the delay repay concept from the railway to toll roads. It would mean an automatic toll refund scheme that issues partial or full refunds to drivers trapped in severe congestion, roadworks or operator-induced disruptions would come into existence. Motorists paying premium commercial tolls expect a reliable, free-flowing journey and should not be charged full price when the operator fails to maintain traffic flow.

Drawing on European tolling models, the Italian network has a motorway refund system, which creates a direct financial incentive for operators to clear incidents and manage roadworks efficiently. Currently, operators do not always manage to do that here. We are not necessarily saying that that is the right system for the UK context, but it is an illustration of what is possible and an example that the Minister may wish to consider.

As Edmund King told the Committee last week, if drivers pay a higher toll under an independent business model, it must work both ways, giving drivers money back when the road fails to operate properly. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments.

[Greg Smith]

I largely wish to comment on amendment 72 in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, but before I do so, I will speak briefly to amendments 39 and 40.

The hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage makes a good point about the increased use of local roads that feed vehicles on to new infrastructure, such as the lower Thames crossing, or indeed bring motorists—be they private motorists or haulage operators—off those pieces of new infrastructure. The current modelling that finances local highway authorities—predominantly councils—up and down the land has no mechanism whatsoever for acknowledging the point that the hon. Member makes. When traffic flows are massively increased on an existing road, those surfaces very quickly degrade and start to resemble the surface of the moon. I am sure we all see that in our own constituencies. It something that drives all of our constituents—and me—absolutely potty on a daily basis.

I see that in my own constituency, where we have seen a large amount of big infrastructure being built over recent years, such as East West Rail. That happens where compounds are put in for heavy goods and groundworks vehicles. The traction zones where those vehicles are accelerating to pull out, or braking to come in, as they go to site, move earth away and bring aggregate in, very quickly degrade.

It makes sense to take into account where an existing local road—one that is owned by a local highway authority and is the responsibility of local council tax payers—is suddenly asked, as they will be in the case of the new lower Thames crossing and potentially other schemes in the future, to be used for infrastructure projects. There should be a flow of funding, either from the licensee or from the Government through the Department for Transport, and ultimately the Treasury, that ensures that council tax payers in local areas are not asked to pick up the bill—as my council has been asked to do for roads broken by HS2 construction—for the construction of the lower Thames crossing and other schemes under the Bill. Indeed, they should not be asked to pick up the bill for the ultimate operation of them, either. I have some sympathy for amendment 39 tabled by the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage.

Amendment 40 is a more problematic proposition. I do not disagree with the sentiment. No one can tell us what the toll on the lower Thames crossing would ultimately be, but we can presume it to be commensurate with the M6 toll, where an average vehicle pays £7 or £8. Therefore, it makes eminent common sense, and is surely reasonable, that someone would be entitled to some sort of compensation, or money back, if they paid the toll but then got snarled up in a traffic jam and just sat in a queue that they could have sat in on the original M6 anyway. I have sat in a jam on that road many times over my life.

The problem with the proposition that the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage has put forward is how that would be determined. With trains, delay repay is very straightforward: what time does the train ultimately pull into the destination station? That is very clear: it is either on time or a number of minutes late. Certainly, since Chiltern Railways was nationalised, I have been on late trains from my constituency every single day, but that is beside the point.

However, how is that level of delay really determined in a private vehicle? Everyone’s journey will be slightly different. What is to stop someone from deliberately driving slowly in order to avoid paying the full toll, artificially making their journey seem longer? Is it for the ORR to determine whether someone has had a longer than usual journey? How will they determine that without—and I do not want to sound all conspiracy theorist—some level of state snooping on people’s exact movements in order to determine how long that journey actually took them?

[Olly Glover]

The shadow Minister gives me an opportunity to say something I omitted from my notes—despite everyone’s obsession with Google, it is incapable of formatting a document properly when it is printed, but that is for another day. The Italian model calculates a base amount for roadworks, plus an extra amount for time lost. One qualifies after any delay on a trip up to 30 km, after a 10-minute delay on trips of 30 to 50 km, or after a 15-minute delay on trips over 50 km. I do not know how they determine that. It may be through some sort of monitoring system, and we already have that in many formats, such as automatic number plate recognition. The Italians are not generally well known for welcoming state surveillance. That is just one mechanism, and I am sure that many options are available using 21st-century technology.

Highways (Financing) Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Olly Glover and Greg Smith

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Olly Glover]

I want to be clear at the beginning that we are keen to press amendment 87 to a vote.

Amendment 45 would mandate an independent modal shift and alternative transport assessment before any new highway tolling licence could be granted. It would prevent multibillion-pound road schemes from proceeding in isolation without evaluating whether rail passenger, rail freight or bus upgrades could deliver better value and lower carbon emissions. There is a clear need to reduce pressure on the Dartford crossing and improve connectivity in the south-east of England via the lower Thames crossing. But so far, the Labour Government appear to be looking only at roads-based means to do so.

I grew up in Staines, which is very close to junction 13 of the M25 and which road nerds will know is the busiest segment of motorway in Europe. When I was growing up and the M25 was new, it had three lanes, which then increased to four and eventually to five. Seeing the M25 permanently under upgrade was the accompaniment to my youth and adolescence. Do people who use that section of the M25 now find it a joyous driving experience, one that is entirely bereft of stress and complaint, or do they still consider it to be what Chris Rea once called a “road to hell”? They still consider it a road to hell, because while the M25 is of course a useful asset, one of the challenges of increased road investment is that very often that capacity gets absorbed and it does not address some of the wider transport challenges.

There is a clear need to improve rail connectivity in the region alongside the lower Thames crossing project. There is currently no Kent to Essex rail connection and very limited provision for channel port freight to move by rail—only by road. There are developed proposals on the table to upgrade the Kent railway network and the Barking freight terminal via High Speed 1 as part of the plan to significantly increase rail freight through the channel tunnel.

As Ralph Smyth from the Transport Action Network argued in front of the Committee last week, granting certainty to a major private road scheme can make it significantly harder for regional mayors or local authorities to promote sustainable alternatives like rail, tram or bus upgrades. Ben Garratt of Logistics UK noted that while road capacity is needed at Dartford, rail freight connectivity to ports plays a vital role in national supply chain resilience and must be integrated into transport planning.

Why should Ministers grant a potentially century-long highway licence without first publishing an independent evaluation of whether rail or public transport investment could solve the bottleneck? If we are to move towards achieving our environmental goals and providing good transport for those who cannot, will not or cannot afford to drive, serious investment in other infrastructure and public transport is needed alongside improving the road network.

Amendment 87 would make it mandatory to publish a local road impact and mitigation report. Toll-avoiding traffic that diverts into surrounding residential streets and local A roads could cause severe congestion, noise, air pollution and safety hazards for nearby communities. The amendment would force the licensing authority to assess the exact financial cost of extraordinary road wear imposed on “adjacent local highway authorities” such as Kent, Essex or Surrey—or whatever they are called now as part of local government reorganisation. As Declan Pang, the director of policy at the Road Haulage Association, warned us last week, traffic displacement and unmitigated local congestion can drive significant indirect costs across local economies and businesses.

I will turn briefly to Opposition amendment 78, which we support. It would require licensing authorities to send a copy of the notice to mayoral combined authorities, combined county authorities or local highway authorities. That would go some way towards addressing some of the deficiencies of clause 4, which leaves it quite open as to which organisations need to be consulted. Clause 4 does not explicitly list local highway authorities, local planning authorities or emergency services—among others—as mandatory statutory consultees. In his comments, I hope the Minister will address why clause 4 is so open and why it does not explicitly name local highway authorities and emergency services as mandatory statutory consultees.

[Greg Smith]

I will start with amendment 78, which was tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton. The hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage hit the nail on the head regarding why we tabled this amendment. We have come back to what I fear will be a familiar theme as we go through the clauses of this Bill in Committee: the openness, at times fuzziness, of the drafting, which leaves too much open to the imagination.

Ill-defined legislation that then gets caught up in the courts forever, with lawyers forever arguing over what was really meant, gives none of us, certainly none of our constituents, our local authorities or those areas of the country that have mayors—mine does not—the clarity that they need and want from this Bill. So amendment 78 really is a very clear and straightforward amendment. It was not tabled with any intent to undermine or derail the Bill, or push it off course, but to give the Government an opportunity to lock in something that gives clarity to the important institutions out there that we and our constituents rely on to deliver local services.

Local authorities and councils—in my case Buckinghamshire, which is also the highways authority covering my constituency—and in other parts of the country, mayors like the Mayor of London, where we are right now, and as per my earlier reference, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, should be locked into the process. I cannot see a single argument why the Government would not want that clarity in the Bill. If they have an in-principle opposition to that, there needs to be a very clear and compelling reason not to simply include the status quo of local authorities, mayors, mayoral combined authorities and the emergency services, as the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage said, in the Bill. I cannot see us moving away from a local authority and mayoral model, but in any future Government—we cannot predict changes—I am sure it will not be difficult to update the legislation to bring those authorities and institutions into effect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Olly Glover]

I did not seek to say that we should not have more cars or support private road users, merely that the reason a lot of people choose to drive is that it has been the relentless direction of policy going back decades. The rail network has significantly contracted, and a lot of investment has gone into motorways. Does the hon. Member accept the clear statistics showing that far fewer young people are learning to drive and they need alternatives? We cannot rely on continuing to promote the private motorcar over everything else.

[Greg Smith]

I am not sure the private motorcar has been promoted over everything else. I accept the challenge the hon. Member lays down about the issues young people have securing a driving test in a timely manner, but the statistics out there absolutely show that—whether it is people commuting to work, travelling for leisure or a holiday, getting kids to school or whatever—the majority of miles travelled across the totality of the country are by private car. That is why the Bill seeks to ensure that the lower Thames crossing is built and there are potential future capacity increases elsewhere: so that the vast majority of our constituents—outside of the country’s major cities, like London, which have tube networks and more frequent bus services—can use their cars. We take issue with amendment 45. I will reflect, when we break for lunch, on whether to report to my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) that the Liberal Democrats have called the junction to Staines on the M25 a “road to hell.”

Amendment 87, which would provide for a comprehensive assessment of the impact on local roads, has more to be said for it. I will not repeat the arguments I made earlier about the importance of the local road network supporting any new infrastructure. There is some merit in the amendment, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage. This is something we should all reflect on. We must try not to look at the road network as if it can be compartmentalised into the strategic road network and local roads, but to see the two as part of a single ecosystem that cannot be separated.

[Justin Madders]

I turn first to amendment 45. I thank the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage for raising whether alternative transport investment should be considered before a licence is granted. I have to say that I have never been entirely clear whether the Liberal Democrats support the lower Thames crossing. The hon. Gentleman’s comments push him more into the “no” territory, but as the Bill progresses we will no doubt see whether they can support it.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill

Debate between Olly Glover and Greg Smith

Report stage & 3rd reading
Wednesday 15th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Olly Glover]

This has been an informative debate on all the new clauses. From a procedural point of view, we are happy not to push new clause 1 to a Division.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

To begin, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests with regard to the synthetic road fuel provided to me for a constituency surgery tour last year. That is not strictly relevant to sustainable aviation fuel, but I want to be entirely transparent about it, as I have been throughout this Bill’s passage.

May I also welcome the new Minister to his place? He has a big pair of shoes to fill, and I equally want to commend the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane)—we did not always see entirely eye to eye—for the effort and attention he put in to getting this Bill through the House and to his other duties in the House.

I begin with new clause 6, which requires the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament a report on the economic impact of the Act once it is in force. This amendment goes to the nub of what is important. Does the Bill enable growth or stifle it? Does it support our world-class aviation industry or go against it? More importantly, does it enable our constituents to do what they have always done and fly, be that on holiday, on business or to visit family and friends overseas, or does it hinder them in doing that; and does it hinder our businesses in bringing goods in and out of the country by air?

New clause 6 forces the Secretary of State to confront the realities of the Bill on multiple fronts. It covers the impact on the UK’s aviation fuel industry and the UK’s sustainable aviation fuel supply, and the impact on small, medium and large producers and potential importers of sustainable aviation fuel.