Pay-per-mile road charging - an idea whose time is yet to come?
How Mayor Khan nixed a radical plan for London-wide scheme in 2023 - story 74
Sir Sadiq Khan was presented with a plan to replace ULEZ with an ambitious road-user charging scheme for the whole of London. But he rejected it.
Joe Hill of the Greater London Project said the plan marked a significant departure from current policy
The plan would’ve seen anyone driving in the capital charged per mile, with rates varying depending on whether they were driving in inner or outer London. TfL’s modelling suggests it would have resulted in 600,000 fewer car journeys.
Unfortunately, this cleaner air future has been cancelled
In the run up to his third term, London Mayor Sadiq Khan ruled out both further changes to ULEZ and road-user charging – likely caused by the bruising Uxbridge by-election in 2023 where ULEZ expansion was clearly a decisive issue in the Conservative victory.
How pay-per-mile would work
As Jim Waterson from London Centric explained, when he broke the story, the concept was not new. Since 2022, Mayor Khan had been discussing a Singapore-style pricing system that would align with London’s net-zero ambitions. I recall hearing him at a public meeting explain how Singaporeans have had a similar system since 1998.
The motivation for change was the realisation in 2022 that London needed to accelerate its shift to net zero and cut London’s traffic by 27%. The TfL board papers from March 2022 said
The Mayor has also asked us to develop proposals for consolidating existing road user charging schemes into one simple and fair scheme where drivers would pay per mile, for introduction by the end of the decade.
A detailed report by London Centric outlined the proposed framework. The city would be divided into three zones — Central, Inner, and Outer London — with differential per-mile rates. Barnes and Mortlake, for instance, would fall under the ‘Inner’ category, with its boundary marked by the South Circular.
TfL projections indicated the scheme would significantly affect non-work-related trips, while commuting patterns would remain largely unchanged due to widespread public transport use among Londoners.
The TfL proposal suggested this reduction in trips might provide the push required to encourage Londoners light users to give up their cars altogher.
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A legacy deferred
Road pricing has long loomed in British policy circles. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was an early proponent and continues to support the idea. Khan himself has overseen a series of landmark road-pricing interventions, including the Congestion Charge, the ULEZ, and new tolls for the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels.
This proposal was another victim of the Uxbridge by-election result in July, 2023.
A few days before the Uxbridge by-election Richard Holden, the Conservative roads minister, stood up in parliament and not-so-subtly put details of a private meeting with Khan’s deputy mayor Seb Dance on the parliamentary record, suggesting that City Hall was looking at per-mile road charging across the capital.
The Tories eventually beat Labour (in the by-election) by just 495 votes.
If now now, when?
If approved, pay-per-mile would have been a growing presence in our life by now, according to London Centric
signage across London would be replaced in 2025, and following the final nod from Khan, the capital’s drivers would be charged by the mile from September 2026.
Financial pressures mean discussion about this form of road pricing are bound to return. In fiscal year 2023/24, the UK government collected approximately £24.3 billion from fuel duty, which constituted about 2.3% of its total tax revenue. That number is falling due to the increasing adoption of electric vehicles.
More importantly, the issues behind the Mayor’s Transport Strategy (MTS) still need to be addressed - a dramatic cut in carbon emissions, rapidly improved air quality for Londoners, reduced congestion enabling buses to travel faster across the capital, and a massive improvement in road safety, cutting the number of deaths and injuries caused by cars.
After seven years, the MTS is not delivering quickly enough. By raising this topic when he did, the Mayor served notice that this proposal, or something like it, will happen in the next fifteen years
For Khan, per-mile charging became a ‘tariff too far’. He declared that ‘while I am mayor, there will be no pay-per-mile scheme’.
But he will - very probably - be replaced within this decade and his successor may have less wriggle room. Against that, she or he might find more Londoners are less bothered by the change. Not least those under thirty years old who dominate the use of shared bikes and are shunning taking their driving test. More on that soon.