Mr. Peter Walsh:

There is a project called Project BRUCE, which is a better road-user charging evaluation. We raised the issue of what might happen at the end of the contract periods with the Department of Transport because we could see that in other jurisdictions it has not been dealt with very well. In some jurisdictions, politicians came under pressure to return the roads to the public free, and it ended up with no revenue to maintain them and it became very difficult to try to reverse out of that. We suggested that this might be a topic that could be looked at sooner rather than later. That happened a couple of years ago. It has now been included in a number of Government policies and strategies around climate action and sustainable mobility in which the issue of how we might pay for the roads is addressed. First, the question of what happens at the end of those contracts needs to be thought through. If we are going to do that, we must bear in mind that most of the toll locations came about by a series of incremental decisions. They are not dispersed in a very scientific manner around the network. It is a question of how fair it is and whether we should look at another distribution of charging.

The wider context is what we were asked to look at. In the context of not having excise duties on fossil fuel, petrol and diesel, how are we going to fund the road network? If we do not have a road network, we do not have any economic activity or social activity and we cannot get around, so we need it and the question is how we pay for it. In terms of the climate action plan, the user pays or distance-pay type arrangements are things that need to be looked at. We are contributing to a couple of committees and producing some information around modelling. We hope to have well-informed decisions progressed over the next couple of years.