19 Mar 2012

Ask Not For Whom The Road Tolls

Been at the PM’s speech on infrastructure and how private companies might take over trunk roads and motorways, potentially bringing in more road tolls. Not exactly a crowd-pleaser you might think and an odd curtain raiser to the budget.

PM said that private companies would not be allowed to levy tolls on existing roads but on closer questioning that seemed to change slightly … road tolls would be allowed on an existing road if “capacity” was improved. It’s not clear yet what the threshold for “increased capacity” might be – a small section of dual carriageway, converting the hard shoulder into a new lane, improving a junction?

The PM outlined a possible approach that would involve replacing the Highways Agency with something the government would consider more dynamic, long leasing (semi-privatising) the roads to private sector concerns. The Highways Agency already does some of that but one senior Tory said the Highways Agency was “sclerotic” and needed replacing with a more free-thinking body that would tap into efficiencies in the private sector. Government would get better returns for its money this way, he said.

 

Elsewhere in leak-land  … some Tories find it odd there should be “Lib Dem anger” about regional pay being introduced across much of the public sector when it was Lib Dem Treasury minister Danny Alexander who wrote to cabinet members telling them to get on to it, especially if their departments had employees emerging from a pay freeze this April. Anyway, it’s now not going to be made much of in the budget even though it was mentioned in the autumn statement.

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