Speakers: Stephen Glaister, Alistair Hunter and Ben Southwood

Calls for a national road pricing scheme are increasing. It’s not a new idea, but the dial may have shifted.

The combined imperatives of achieving net zero, addressing congestion, and replacing the lost tax revenue caused by the uptake in electric vehicles may now overcome the factors that have previously prevented the widespread implementation of road pricing.

The Transport Committee has urged the Government to examine the options and recommend a new road charging mechanism by the end of the year. New technologies would enable road pricing to be smarter and fairer, but there remain significant obstacles.

This half-day conference will consider the challenges to the development of a workable and publicly acceptable road pricing scheme, what it can realistically achieve and how local and national schemes could work together.

About the speakers:

Stephen Glaister

Stephen Glaister is Professor Emeritus of Transport and Infrastructure at Imperial College London and Associate, London School of Economics. He has specialised in the economics of transport with a concentration on economic regulation and deregulation. He was a member of the Government's first Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment and he has been Specialist Advisor to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Transport. He acted as advisor to the Department of Transport on bus deregulation. He has developed models for the Department for the cost benefit assessment of urban public transport subsidies.

He was a member of the Steering Group of the Department's Road Pricing Feasibility Study and has extensive experience of providing high-level technical and policy advice, including as a contributor to the 2006 Eddington Transport Review, the 2020 Oakervee Review of HS2 and the 2020 independent Review of TfL’s Funding.

 Alistair Hunter

 Alistair Hunter is the Highways Business leader in Arup's UK, India, Middle East and Africa region. He gave evidence to the recent Transport Committee inquiry into road pricing.

His expertise is within transport, helping develop meaningful strategy and policy for clients across areas such as regulation, low carbon mobility, network planning and organisational transformation. He has helped clients on national projects and strategies, including Highways England’s Connecting the Country and most recently the Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s Project Rapid that helps establish the economics and infrastructure required to support the electric vehicle transition.

Ben Southwood

Ben Southwood is Head of Housing, Transport and the Urban Space at Policy Exchange, a leading UK think tank which develops and promotes new policy ideas which deliver better public services, a stronger society and a more dynamic economy.

He is the author of the recent Policy Exchange’s recent report on road pricing ‘A New Deal for Drivers: Unleashing the power of Britain’s greatest infrastructure resource’.

He was a management consultant at KPMG, an economics correspondent for City A.M., and for five years Head of Research and Head of Policy at the Adam Smith Institute. He has written for academic journals, every major newspaper and magazine, and appeared on every major radio station and television news programme.