My thanks to you, Ms Rees, for chairing this debate. May I also thank everybody who has contributed? It has been a constructive debate, with much of it centring on whether or not TfL and the Mayor of London are properly financed. Even if one concedes—which I do not—that they are not properly financed, this is not the right route to go down in order to raise funding. It is hugely divisive. It sets community against community and sets London against the others. It will create a literal financial wall right around London’s border. It is totally wrong.
If this policy is implemented, I wish businesses and public sector organisations in the outer London boroughs good luck in recruiting staff. We need to do everything we can to prevent it from being implemented. Raising revenue from people whom to whom the Mayor is totally unaccountably is the wrong way to raise taxation. It is taxation without representation; it is taxation without accountability.
That is why it is a fundamentally poor policy that has been ill thought through and will be devastating to my constituents and to ordinary people in Dartford and around the south-east who are just going about their
daily business, going into London to visit friends and loved ones and to work and shop. Those are the people who will be hardest hit by this proposed charge, and that is why it is fundamentally wrong.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the proposal for an outer London congestion charge.
3.45 pm
Sitting suspended.