The UK is in dire need of a coherent, comprehensive and sustainable transport strategy.The AA looks to the coming White Paper for a framework that will set out the necessary policies, backed by research, and supported by a programme of short, medium and long-term action. This action programme should feature published performance indicators to measure progress on pollution, congestion, road casualties, and travel security. The approach to policy should, in the AA’s view, be very wary of resort to blunt instruments such as the steadily rising rate of fuel tax as a means of reducing car traffic growth.What is needed instead is a careful understanding of people’s needs and concerns as individuals, and a set of measures that go with the grain of these concerns. AA members have a number of concerns. At the head of these is the cost of motoring and, in particular, current and proposed levels of fuel tax. There is strong feeling against them and a sense that the motorist simply is not getting a fair deal in terms of the roads and transport system available on one hand, and motoring taxes being paid on the other. Britain’s archaic system of roads and local transport finance is in urgent need of reform. In its present form, the system fails to satisfy the conditions that are essential both to the efficient planning and delivery of roads services and to the securing of public confidence that money is being well spent. The government’s What Role for Trunk Roads? document explicitly raises the key “funding and commercialisation” issue. The AA supports a new direct, transparent relationship between what motorists pay, who they pay it to, and what service they receive. Only a major restructuring, nationally, involving the escalating amounts — £27 billion in this financial year — that road-users already pay in fuel tax and the road fund licence, is likely to provide a framework in which funding and charging issues can be addressed and evolved. Without fundamental reform, and a new system that people can trust as fair, there is little chance of winning public acceptance for new and different ways of paying. The AA has taken advice from Professor David Newbery of Cambridge University, studied the government’s papers, and discussed the matter widely with interested parties. There has been overwhelming support too from economists, public finance experts, and those charged with delivering service, of the need to separate tax for general expenditure and charge for the provision of road-related services. The Transport Select Committee and the European Commission are among those who have endorsed key principles put forward in this work. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting