Dartford River Crossing Tolls

I will come to the issue of the charges that were put in place as of 15 November—four weeks ago. On the position once the bridge had been paid for through the toll, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, but would it have been possible in the 1980s to predict the volume of traffic that we have today? Some 53 million people make that crossing each year. Would he have been able to predict at that time the state of the economy, in particular the success and continual growth that we have had, particularly in the regions that we are discussing? I will come to the current downturn in a moment. We had to make difficult decisions. That is why I said at the beginning of my comments that the consequence of the growth in traffic in the 1980s was a realisation that we needed a further crossing, and that is exactly why the QEII bridge was built. Following on from that, let me deal with the issue of removing the tolls. All the profiling that we did in 2000 to 2001 showed that if the tolls were removed, there would be an increase of about 17 per cent. in the number of people attempting to use the crossing. Therefore, if one thinks about the approach to the tunnels and the difficulties that occur even now if a vehicle breaks down, they will admit that delay and the congestion that it causes are substantial. If there were no tolls and no plaza, the pollution caused by the number of vehicles trying to get into the entrance would be even greater than it is currently.