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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

6 March 2008

There are six million more vehicles on our roads today than in 1997 when Labour took office, we now have more two-car households than no-car households and traffic looks set to continue growing - much of it on roads and motorways that are already operating at close to capacity during busy periods.

If congestion is left to grow unchecked, it will increasingly disrupt people as they go about their daily lives and no one knows this better than my long suffering constituents in Dover and Deal. We have to put up with operation stack, snarl-ups around Aycliffe and stagnation on Townwall Street – and on top of all that, for the next fifteen weeks we’ll have to cope with the re-surfacing of the A20.

Congestion is a national problem and it hits our economy hard. In fact Sir Rod Eddington estimated that unless we take action, congestion could cost the country an extra £22 billion in wasted time by 2025 and that's not something we can allow to happen.

We need to tackle overcrowding on our busiest routes today to avoid gridlock tomorrow and although the Government is already adding new capacity - building and widening roads is an expensive business and it would be economically and environmentally unsustainable to just keep building without limit. But that’s not to say that Dover doesn’t deserve better road links and I for one will continue campaigning for the dualling of the A2 and improvements to the A20 approach road.

I’ve always been in favour of putting a levy on foreign lorries travelling on British roads in the same way as many EU countries charge our HGVs travelling on continental roads. Whenever I’ve raised this with Ministers I’ve been told that the situation would be best resolved by the introduction of universal road pricing which would apply a surcharge to foreign lorries but this week the Government’s enthusiasm for pay-as-you-go motoring seems to have cooled.

The Secretary of State for Transport, Ruth Kelly says she is going ahead with some local road charging pilot projects but the roll-out of a nationwide scheme seems a long way away. Instead, she wants to get the best possible use out of our current road network as a means of improving our road journeys as soon as possible. She’s taken a more immediate and pragmatic approach to the great roads debate by targeting those parts of the network that are busiest, where even minor hold ups can turn into major delays, and where real improvements to traffic flow can be achieved.

Ministers want to extend the use of active traffic management and variable speed controls and to widen the use of ‘hard shoulder running’ – which has been tested with such success on the M42. These measures may well free up traffic flows on our motorway networks but they’ll do little to solve local road congestion and nothing to address the need for a foreign lorry levy.