§ Mr. Don FosterTo ask the Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions what recent(a) assessment he has made and (b) research he has commissioned into the cost, in terms of customer and business time and financial impact, of transport delays. [45428]
§ Mr. JamiesonThe 10-year Plan for Transport made estimates of the amount of time lost on English roads as a result of delays due to congestion in 2000. The Plan made forecasts for 2010 of the increase in congestion and of the extent to which the policies in the Plan would reduce this rise in congestion.
A number of external estimates have also been made of the value road users might place on the elimination of congestion. These use different methods and therefore produce different results, but they all agree that this value runs to billions of pounds per annum.
Neither these external estimates, nor those undertaken by my Department, can be translated directly into assessments of the cost of congestion to business or more widely. This is because they relate only to the amount of time road users lose to congestion and the value of this time to them. They take no account of the costs of implementing the policies or schemes needed to reduce the amount of time lost. The true costs of congestion are therefore the economic and other benefits forgone if we do not tackle it.
We shall be doing further work in this area, the lessons from which we will take into account as part of our Review of the 10 year-Plan which we intend to publish in July.