Birt toll road plan lacks PM's support
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Plans by Lord Birt to create a network of toll "supermotorways" looked doomed last night after it emerged Tony Blair had already dismissed the idea as too expensive.
Motoring organisations and environmentalists joined yesterday to attack the proposals, drawn up by the peer in his role as the Prime Minister's adviser on transport.
Lord Birt wants to create "premium" pay roads between England's major cities with few exits, to repeat the success of the French peage system.
The former BBC director-general, brought in by Downing Street to engage in "blue skies thinking", ran into immediate opposition, not least within Stephen Byers' Department of Transport, when the plan was leaked at the weekend.
But the biggest obstacle is likely to be Mr Blair himself, according to Edmund King, the RAC Foundation's executive director. He revealed yesterday that he had suggested a similar network to Mr Blair earlier this year. "When we had a meeting with the Prime Minister and put forward that 'high highways' option, the Prime Minister's exact words were: 'That's a lot of dosh'," he told BBC Radio Five Live's Sunday Breakfast.
The RAC Foundation is not opposed to tolls, but believes the Government should consider widening current roads instead of building new ones. Mr King said a recent report by the foundation showed that creating a special road network would cost up to £750bn over the next 50 years and would be logistically and environmentally difficult.
Last week a survey for the RAC Foundation showed three-quarters of drivers would support tolls if they were combined with road improvements.
Downing Street said the peer's advice to the Prime Minister was confidential and stressed Government policy was set out in the ten-year transport plan.
Tony Juniper, policy director at Friends of the Earth, called on the Government to "reject this nonsense immediately". "This plan seems to have come from the same John Birt patch of blue sky that brought so much harm to the BBC," he said. "Building a network of supermotorways across the countryside would be an environmental disaster."
Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat transport spokes-man, said: "It would be crazy to build more roads, an approach that all the evidence shows creates more traffic, without first addressing the urgent need to make significant improvements to public transport."
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