Tories pledge to dump TIF’s road pricing requirement

24 April 2008
 
A Conservative Government would remove the requirement for councils bidding for Transport Innovation Fund cash to introduce congestion charging.

The party is to publish detailed proposals on how councils should structure bids for the £200M a year that ‘give maximum flexibility to local councils’, but were likely to include schemes to improve bus services and cycling.

Since the transport innovation fund was first mooted, the County Surveyors’ Society has argued that it should pay for ‘imaginative, integrated transport measures’ in shire areas (Surveyor, 28 April 2005). A number of county councils which bid for TIF money had their proposals rejected.

Cumbria proposed combating Lake District summer congestion with higher parking charges; and Lincolnshire, an urban traffic management control system.

Conservative leader David Cameron criticised Labour’s ‘top down, centralised, one-size-fits-all’ approach. ‘This isn’t innovation – it’s conscription, telling people that Whitehall knows best, and their views don’t matter,’ he claimed. But he promised to honour any existing TIF commitments to local authorities that the party inherited.

So far, 11 areas have received TIF pump-priming money to develop packages of measures to tackle congestion. Transport secretary, Ruth Kelly, has promised to provide up to £200M a year to implement measures to tackle congestion until 2018/19. Cambridgeshire and Greater Manchester have developed and submitted proposals.

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