Rumours were rife. The Tories were going to make political mincemeat of me this evening. In the event – not a peep!
What’s the story? I held an extraordinary meeting of the Transport Committee tonight to hear representations from Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster – politicians, residents’ associations and businesses – about the Mayor’s proposal to extend the Central London Congestion Charge westwards across those boroughs (although not all of K & C).
The Tories had appealed to me to hold such a meeting in advance of forming the Assembly’s response to the Mayor’s consultation. They were clearly upset that I agreed to hold a meeting – much easier to berate me for not doing so.
I thought it was important to hear the objections to help the committee form its views – along with questions to Transport for London itself on the Wednesday following on finance, technology, Capita’s customer service (ha!) and other critical issues.
But what was really upsetting the Tories was that the Lib Dems are opposing the Mayor’s plans for expansion – because it is too soon to judge how the main scheme is working, financially the scheme doesn’t add up and the area is very different from the existing scheme. Two thirds of the new area is residential – not the obvious in and out to work area that the first scheme area covered.
Anyway, the current technology is not what we need for any extensions to the scheme. An area charge is a blunt instrument and was acceptable to launch the scheme and in an area of in/out work journeys. But what polling across London shows is that there are many, many congested areas in town centres and there are specific times of day or days of the week that are congested. We need to move to a system – such as using satellite technology – that can target congested hot spots.
Then those boroughs where residents have reached the point where they need something as drastic as charging to resolve a particular congestion problem should be able to join in the scheme. Moreover, the poor motorist who does need to use a car, should not be faced with lots of different schemes across London, but with a transponder in the car automatically charging to an account as the car enters a charging zone.
As for the meeting itself – it went very well. Excellent presentations from the small businesses there – a butcher and a fishmonger. And we really heard all the angles. Whether I will be able to get cross-party agreement on the Assembly response to the Mayor’s statutory consultation with us, who knows? I am hopeful that we do, at least, all agree that it is too soon to move forward with too much unknown at this point in time.
