Filed under: Congestion Charge
With the recent publicity over the outstanding Congestion Charge payments due from embassies in London (see pdf document here), triggered by the arrival of the new US ambassador representing the Obama administration, once again we have to rehearse the arguments why the diplomats should shut up and pay up.
Firstly, and contrary to the claim by the US embassy, the Congestion Charge is clearly a user-charge – not a tax, from which diplomats are exempt under the Vienna Convention on consular relations. The Congestion Charge requires drivers to pay to use a small geographical area in central London during specific hours, and as such it is no different in principle from the charge made to drive along an American toll road, which British and other foreign diplomatic staff in the US are all required to pay.
And let’s not forget that the diplomats who refuse to pay the charge neverthless benefit from its results – not only from the freer movement of traffic in central London but also from the local and global environmental impact of the reduction in CO2, PM10 and NOx levels.
It should be remembered that the US embassy paid the congestion charge for more than two years following its introduction in February 2003. It was only in July 2005, after the charge increased from £5 to £8, that they announced they were not going to pay it any more. Quite how a £3 increase transformed a user-charge into a tax they did not explain.
The refusal of embassies to pay the charge means that Londoners are having to carry the burden of a total of £30 million of embassies’ debts on their shoulders during a recession – over £3 million of which is owed by the US embassy alone. If any of us behaved like that we would have had the bailiffs around a long time ago. l don’t think that’s acceptable at all, and it stretches our hospitality too far.
The US embassy’s refusal to pay the Congestion Charge was exactly the sort of regressive political decision we had come expect under the presidency of George Bush. Now that we have a new administration, which has emphasised its green credentials, particularly in the build-up to the Copenhagen climate change negotiations in December, we expect something different. Hence my letter to President Obama (pdf here) urging him to reverse the decision made under his predecessor.
Everyone in the UK with progressive politics, myself included, greeted the election of President Obama with enthusiasm, hoping that it represented a change in direction for the US. One straightforward way the President can demonstrate to Londoners that his administration has indeed broken with the politics of the Bush period is to instruct the US embassy to start paying the Congestion Charge and clear its outstanding debts to Transport for London. Otherwise this one is not going to go away and will be a continuing source of political embarrassment to the US government. It’s not as though the richest country on the earth can’t afford to pay up.
So President Obama, YES YOU CAN!
Watch BBC London News report here (from 9:52)
August 18, 2009
It remains a continuing scandal that, nearly six years after it was first introduced, many embassies in London are still refusing to pay the Congestion Charge. Their justification for this stance – that the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations frees them from the obligation to pay taxes – is an entirely spurious argument, since the CC clearly qualifies as a user charge rather than a tax. Refusing to pay it is no different from refusing to pay the charge for driving across a toll bridge, for example, and no embassy anywhere is claiming they are exempt from that.
The precise cost of this Congestion Charge evasion to Londoners was unclear, so I tabled a question at Mayor’s Question Time in November asking for a breakdown of the amounts owed by the various London embassies. The report (Word document here) supplied by Transport for London contains some shocking statistics.
Top of the non-payment league is the US embassy. Its diplomats have driven through the Congestion Charge Zone 26,165 times without paying. The embassy owes £209,320 in unpaid charges and a staggering £2,735,245 in unpaid fines.
The total figures for money owed by payment-dodging embassies are even more eye-watering. Altogether, diplomatic staff have made 220,540 journeys through the CCZ without paying, resulting in £1,764,320 in unpaid charges and £23,120,389 in unpaid fines.
This situation is totally unacceptable. It is not for embassies to pick and choose which rules they obey and which they don’t. While we are belt-tightening during these difficult economic times, Londoners are having to carry these skinflint diplomats on their backs.
The Mayor needs to stand up to these freeloaders, and insist that they begin paying the Congestion Charge and clear their outstanding debts. It’s not on to have such large sums of money being lost to TfL, particularly at a time when fares are being increased above inflation by the Mayor and transport projects cut.
(See also reports in the Guardian and the Times.)
November 20, 2008
China Daily has published my article ”Time for congestion charging in Beijing?”
You can also join in the discussion at China Dialogue.
October 29, 2008
Having been in Beijing for the whole of the very successful 29th Olympiad in August, and then attended the Urban Transportation Management Forum organized by the Shenzhen Municipal Government to talk to their Planning Bureau about the experience of congestion charging in London, during my visit of East Coast cities in China l was struck by the possibility of introducing congestion charging to Beijing itself. Such measures need increasingly to be considered in response to the necessity both to reduce congestion and also to improve air quality in Beijing, particularly after the successful short-term measures undertaken during the Olympics come to an end.
Certainly the clear blue skies at the end of the Beijing Olympics were impressive, particularly after the concerns expressed by some about the possible adverse effects of air pollution on the performance of top athletes. The latter of course did not materialize, as we saw 43 world records and 120 Olympic records shattered in the course of the Games. Credit here should go to the initiatives taken by the city authorities to improve the air quality in Beijing over the period of the Olympics, which has essentially been achieved by providing better and cheaper public transport and by implementing the car licensing scheme. The success of the latter has interestingly led to local people calling for the extension of the two-month odd-even license plate restriction that allows the city’s 3.3 million private car owners to drive only on alternate days. In the case of public transport Zhou Zhengyu, Deputy Director of the Beijing municipal committee during the Olympics, announced that the reduced ticket prices brought in for the duration of the Games would be extended for some considerable time afterwards. Remember that in Beijing there was a cut in the standard price of a bus ticket by 60 per cent for regular passengers and 80 per cent for students. And last October, the price of a single journey subway ticket was slashed by 30 per cent to 2 yuans. So, not surprisingly, as a result of the cheaper fares and traffic control measures introduced for the Olympics, the proportion of Beijing residents now using public transport on a daily basis is up to 45 per cent from 35 per cent.
The national government initiative since the beginning of September to raise taxes on big cars and reduce them on smaller ones, in order to save energy and cut pollution, will also contribute to improving the quality of life in Beijing. Owners of cars with engines above 4 litres capacity will have to pay 40 per cent tax, double the existing rate. The tax for cars between 3 and 4 litres will rise from 15 to 25 per cent, while those below 1 litre capacity will be reduced from 3 to 1 per cent. Furthermore, the tax move is a good first step for the country towards an energy-efficient and environmentally friendly economy, while helping to save fuel and thus increase energy security.
Yet Beijing will still be home to about 3.3 million cars, and the figure is growing by 300,000 a year. The only solution to this challenge is the continuous development of the city’s public transport system along the lines already implemented by the authorities, but with one addition – congestion charging that will ration road space by price, so that the marginal cost of an additional trip by a car owner will be paramount in their minds.
The geography of Beijing, with its various ring roads, would lend itself very easily to congestion charging. A congestion charge zone could be introduced within either Ring Road 2 or 3 at the beginning and then be extended outwards depending on the success of the scheme and public demand for it. As in London, in order to win public support, the funds raised from the congestion charge would have to be seen to be reinvested into public transport, and some exemptions or at least a discount rate might have to be granted to residents within the charge zone. Nevertheless, the scheme could be put into operation very quickly using simple technology like CCTV at the entry points off the ring roads and camera enforcement using a database of car licenses. (Though l understand there is not as yet a national database of car licenses in China, and l am unsure as to numbers of cars that move between the various cities of China, this should not be an insurmountable hurdle for the authorities to overcome.)
So l look forward to one day visiting Beijing again and seeing road congestion charging, or least another variant of road pricing, being implemented to improve the quality of life for Beijingers. This should be the icing on the cake, on top of the outstanding investment already undertaken by the authorities, and would be consistent with the Chinese national authorities’ focus on people-centered and scientific methods of development.
September 12, 2008
