Skip to main content
THE LONDON CONGESTION CHARGE

Following the announcement by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan that the amount of the London Congestion Charge would increase to £15 a day, with longer hours of applicability  and extending to 7 days a week, I requested Greater London Assembly Member Andrew Dismore to ask the Mayor on my behalf what mandate - if any - he considered he had for these measures.

Mr Dismore declined to put such a question, arguing that in the current pandemic emergency situation the Mayor had no choice in the matter, because these measures were virtually ordered by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps as a condition of the government's bailout of Transport for London.

I asked Mr Dismore if he could point to that part of Mr Shapps' relevant letter to the Mayor [14 May 2020] requiring the Mayor to make these changes to the Congestion Charge.

Mr Dismore pointed to paragraph 12h of the letter. In that paragraph, as a condition of the bailout, the Mayor is required to reintroduce the Congestion Charge and to "urgently bring forward proposals to widen the scope and level" of this Charge (and other Charges). 

So all the the Mayor was required to do was to reintroduce the Charge and to "urgently bring forward proposals" relating to its scope and level. He could, therefore, have simply (and "urgently") brought proposals forward.  The letter did not require him to implement them.

In summary, it was the Mayor's decision to increase the Congestion Charge to £15 a day, seven days a week. No-one else's.

Geoffrey Alderman
posted 9 June 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

  A  MILLER'S TALE On Friday 1 st October the University of Bristol issued a statement [1] in relation to Dr David Miller, who until that date (and from 2018) had been Professor of Sociology at that University. The statement told us that Professor Miller was no longer employed by the University, and it explained, in very general terms, why:   We have a duty of care to all students and the wider University community, in addition to a need to apply our own codes of conduct consistently and with integrity. Balancing those important considerations, and after careful deliberation, a disciplinary hearing found Professor Miller did not meet the standards of behaviour we expect from our staff and the University has concluded that Professor Miller’s employment should be terminated with immediate effect.   The background - or at least some background – to this decision to dismiss Professor Miller is I think well known. As I noted in the Jewish News last March [2] , for some cons
2 comments
Read more

THE JEWISH CHRONICLE: BEATING HEART OR BLEEDING HEART?

In recent weeks I’ve given interviews to British, Israeli and even German newspapers on the subject of the fate of the Jewish Chronicle. Naturally I have been careful to declare a number of interests. It was for the Jewish Chronicle that from 2002 until 2016 I wrote the paper’s weekly anchor comment column. I never missed a deadline. Besides filing these columns I wrote others for the paper, including book reviews and obituaries. Then I should add that as part of my academic research I have actually read every edition of the JC, from its very first in 1841. I still resort to its invaluable online searchable archive to check this fact or that. In common with many other newspapers the JC has been struggling financially in recent years. In 2018 it posted a loss of around £1.5 million. Its immediate future appeared to have been secured by donations from (as the Financial Times unhelpfully put it) “unnamed individuals,” but evidently this was not enough to sav
1 comment
Read more