Letter Published in Local Transport Today

The RAC Foundation is out of touch with ordinary motorists

LTT 19th June 2009

Paul Biggs, Director and environment spokesman, Association of British Drivers, Tamworth, Staffs

In his letter to LTT (Letters 5 June), the RAC Foundation’s Stephen Glaister has swallowed the two transport red herrings of carbon dioxide and road pricing whole. He could have gone for the anti-driver hat-trick if he’d also managed to include the ‘speed kills’ mantra.

Glaister is being extremely naive in thinking that road pricing will raise extra revenue or result in more road building. Even if road pricing were ‘revenue neutral’, it couldn’t be ‘cost neutral’ due to the high implementation and running costs. Reducing fuel duty/VED and replacing it with road pricing would cost £billions more to collect. Drivers doing less than 5,000 miles per year and travelling off-peak are likely to be either economically inactive or working hours that allow them to avoid congestion. Failing to recover lower fuel/VED costs from them via road pricing would increase the burden on essential peak time users.

The leader of Birmingham City Council recently described such a policy as being ‘morally corrupt’, so it beggars belief that the director of an organisation that purports to represent the interests of drivers doesn’t concur with that view.

Furthermore, if a significant number of lower income drivers were priced off the roads, which the RAC Foundation seems to desire, then the Government would argue that more road building isn’t necessary.

The voters in Manchester told transport secretary Geoff Hoon where he could stick his transport investment carrot in return for accepting congestion charging, despite a loaded poll question accompanied by ‘Yes’ propaganda. The non-existent ‘Plan B’ was soon found, unlike the weapons of mass destruction that Hoon promised would be found in Iraq when he was defence secretary.

I have no doubt that Hoon’s transport successor, Lord Adonis, would receive a similar negative response to road building in exchange for national road pricing.

The Government has plenty of money, including the £46bn per annum squeezed out of that ‘wallet on wheels’ known as the driver. The problem is, as the Taxpayers’ Alliance will testify, that the Government wastes around £50bn per year of our money on unnecessary bureaucracy, bureaucrats, quangos, consultants, projects and a whole host of hangers-on. Cutting waste requires no expensive Big Brother infrastructure but would help fund road building and other essential services.

Glaister’s attempt to link road pricing with climate change is equally silly. Even if CO2 is a more significant driver of climate than natural cycles and solar factors, which it isn’t, there would be no effect on climate.

Cars produce 11% of the UK’s 2% contribution to global man-made CO2 emissions, plus cars and trucks in the EU as a whole only contribute 2% to global man-made CO2.

Clearly the RAC Foundation believes that it needs to be politically correct in order to be consulted by the Government but in doing so it has become a voice of the New Labour anti-car agenda rather than a voice for drivers and has set itself on a collision course with grass roots drivers organisations such as the ABD.