Dartford crossing price increases

Once again, despite protests, the English public have lost out to the government with little or no consultation. You'll note that I stated English - after all these things don't seem to happen in Scotland or Wales.

The company responsible for the Dartford Crossing in Kent has today raised the price of using the crossing. Now whilst I appreciate that for a lot of the country it make little difference, the people who rely on this crossing now face up to 50% increase in their annual travel costs per annum. The price of a standard passenger car has now increased from £1.00 per crossing to £1.50.

The crossing handles, on average, 150000 vehicles a day. If we were to say that the vehicles were just cars that equates to £54,750,000 turnover per annum. And to be fair, probably 25% of the traffic is actually lorries which, up to today, pay over £3 per crossing.

The Private Finance Initiative scheme allowed Dartford River Crossing Ltd a 20 year concession to collect revenue, although this could be ended early once debts were repaid. Under the scheme, some parties had expected that the government of the time would scrap the toll once the debt had been repaid and a suitable maintenance fund had been accumulated, which was deemed to have occurred on 31 March 2002. However, surprise! surprise! the toll was retained however under the new principle of Road User Charging, which had been introduced in the 2000 Transport Act as a means of using road pricing for controlling traffic congestion and funding local and national transport schemes. Under this act, the A282 Trunk Road (Dartford-Thurrock Crossing charging scheme) Order 2002 allowed the continuation of the crossing toll, which officially became a charge and not a toll on 1 April 2003. At the same time, under the terms of the 1988 Act the DRC company was liquidated and management of the crossing was contracted to Le Crossing Company Limited on behalf of the Highways Agency. Under the new user charge regime, Le Crossing collects the charges which are set in statutory Charging Orders under the 2000 Act, with the revenue passing in full to the government for redistribution, and annual public accounts of the operation published showing expenses/revenues of the crossing.

So the toll is turned into a 'charge' under a road pricing act, and the government now earns increased revenue from a scheme they put little money into in the first place. Yet another of example of stealth taxing. What a joke!