A study published in June found that London still has the worst road traffic congestion in Europe, the third year in a row the UK capital has won that inglorious prize. Traffic analysts INRIX calculated that London drivers spent an average of 99 hours sitting in traffic during 2023, a gigantic waste of time that cost each of them an average of £900 a year and the capital’s economy £3.8 billion.
The figures were released just a few weeks after Sadiq Khan comfortably won his third term as Mayor, following a campaign in which he stoutly maintained that no London-wide congestion charging scheme would be introduced for as long as he was the boss of City Hall. He had previously seemed keen on such a policy. But with the Tories and their sometimes criminal and extremist mob screaming their heads off about his second expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), and his own party leader telling him off after the Tory candidate’s shameless misrepresentation of that policy helped him hang on in the Uxbridge by-election last July, Khan seems to have concluded that discretion was the better part of valour.
That was understandable, but a pity. And, given that the ULEZ turned out to be a campaign attack dog that yapped for months on end but turned out to have no teeth, who knows, had Khan run on a congestion charge expansion platform we might now be asking not what if our daily gridlock were soothed, but how soon will it happen.
What, then, needs to be done to muster enough public support for a London-wide scheme to be placed with confidence before London’s voters at a future mayoral contest?
Perhaps it could be pointed out that an array of think tanks, transport wonks, lobby groups and even Tory politicians have made the case that a modern, flexible, road user charging (RUC) scheme covering all of Greater London would do wonders for most of the people of the city, including those who most need to use cars, vans and lorries to get around.
It isn’t only the left who’ve favoured it. As “Red Ken” Livingstone enjoyed pointing out prior to launching the central London Congestion Charge zone in 2003 – in the face of opposition from not only Tories but his own closest advisers – Margaret Thatcher’s favourite economist, Milton Friedman of the free market Chicago School, had long supported RUC as a tax to be levied from individuals “in proportion to their use of the service“.
One year later, the Institute of Economic Affairs, latterly allies of Liz Truss, commissioned work which found that the London charge had achieved its goals and set out arguments for a national system. In 2015, Steve Norris, Livingstone’s erstwhile Tory challenger for the mayoralty and an ex-transport minister, wrote that “the case for replacing our current system of fuel tax with something more advanced has never been stronger”.
More recently, Centre for London, BusinessLDN, the Campaign for Better Transport, the Green Party and even a Tory-chaired Commons transport committee have concluded that an up-to-date RUC system would be desirable. In short, everyone who has ever given serious thought to how best to tackle road traffic congestion – and to funding the road network for the long term, as the growth in electric vehicles reduces the yield from fuel duty – has concluded that more RUC is the way to do it.
But no rainbow coalition of experts would be enough on its own to overcome the culture war fury that would be eagerly whipped up by the less enlightened Tories – these days, that’s most of them – and their populist allies, for whom anything green is seen as a threat to their liberty and anything that curbs the freedoms of motorists is akin to burning a Union Jack.
Give them a referendum on the issue, as that Uxbridge by-election effectively became, and they will, Brexit-style, stir up more hostile reaction to their own questionable claims than you can daub on the side of a bus. We’ve seen it before, elsewhere. In 2005, the voters of Edinburgh rejected city-wide congestion charging by three to one in a standalone plebiscite. Three years later, their counterparts in Greater Manchester did the same, but more so. Those outcomes were despite Livingstone having been re-elected in 2004 and his London innovation being hailed as a success.
Giving a single transport policy and associated tax its very own democratic exercise is anomalous to say the least. But even when embedded in a full manifesto RUC can focus discontent. Livingstone lost to Boris Johnson in 2008 for a variety of reasons, but his Tory challenger’s promising a fresh consultation about Livingstone’s western expansion of the Congestion Charge zone – effectively a pledge to remove it, which he later did – probably helped.
No one should underestimate the challenge of securing a mayoral mandate for a reform that would revolutionise the city’s way of life. Meeting that challenge will require a combination of stress-tested technology, foolproof policymaking, a clear retail offer – you pays your money and you gets your clearer roads – and a persuasion campaign that enjoys unequivocal backing from national government. London is the growth engine of the UK economy. The time to start making its road networks aid the running of that engine instead of hindering it is now.
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