WEST MIDLANDS REJECTS CONGESTION CHARGING

25-07-2007

Roads pricing won’t be coming anytime soon to the West Midlands. At today's crunch meeting of local council leaders and Centro, it was decided to bid instead for public transport improvements worth £4.5 billion.

The government is known to be actively seeking a provincial city to pilot a London-style congestion charge, and is dangling a £2 billion investment carrot to the region which can make the most persuasive case.

Although Manchester has yet to formally make a submission, it’s expected that they will be seeking the cash, which is being made available through the Transport Innovation Fund.

A consensus has emerged that this would simply not be practical in a conurbation like the West Midlands, which is less centralised and has a number of competing centres.

Wolverhampton Council leader Roger Lawrence told us: “Manchester has completed motorway box, and the authorities of Salford, Manchester and Trafford are in close proximity to each other.

“Businesses are more concentrated in the centre and so is leisure and shopping.

“It would be a different story in an area like ours. If you forced people to pay to go into Birmingham, but not Solihull for example, you can imagine what would happen.”

Lawrence also said that he and his colleagues weren’t persuaded that congestion charging was technically feasible across such a large region, nor had he seen a reliable economic impact study.

Instead they’ve submitted a wish-list of new tram routes and bus improvements to ministers.

“We would need all of these public transport improvements in place before we were in any position to go down the congestion charging route” explained Lawrence.

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