Pay-to-drive motorway is taking its toll

Unions at the Highways Agency have claimed that Britain's first pay-to-drive motorway has been a 'disaster' since it opened.

It is easy to see why.

The prices have soared, the number of vehicles using it is low and the Government has had to fork out hundreds of millions on upgrading the public M6 to cope with increasing traffic and congestion.

The Highways Agency's chief executive Graham Dalton told MPs this week that 35,000 vehicles a day were using the road but 100,000 were using the main M6 route.

It is becoming a popular argument to nationalise the 27-mile M6 Toll.

People like Geoff Inskip, chief executive of the West Midlands transport authority Centro, want to see it happen while George Adamson, leader of Cannock Chase District Council, is asking Ed Miliband to put such a policy in Labour's General Election manifesto.

Tom Fanning, the chief executive of M6 Toll operator Midland Expressway, must have had enough of all this.

"It's complete nonsense to suggest that the M6 Toll has proved a disaster," he says.

"Up to 50,000 customers continue to choose to use the M6 Toll each work day; not just 35,000. This traffic would otherwise be adding to the existing congestion on the M6."

But the crux of his argument, and one that is often lost amid the growing calls for the taxpayer to take it on, is that it hasn't cost the public anything.

The road was built entirely by the private sector.

It means the public doesn't have any real rights over it at all. If it had been done by a Private Finance Initiative scheme – where the taxpayer gradually pays the costs back over many years, that might be different. But it wasn't. So the only thing anyone can do about it is decide whether or not they think it's worth £5.50 a time to not sit in traffic.

If they don't, tough. That's the way it goes in business. You get what you pay for.

Education, education, education? Get the first one right and we're sorted, says Digby.

Lord Digby Jones is a fascinating speaker and it is easy to see why he got made the head of the Confederation of British Industry.

He took charge of the room when he turned up to address businesses and others at Wolverhampton Science Park and then pulled no punches when he suggested that the way to get parents to encourage their kids to read and write was to threaten to take their benefits off them if they don't meet the right standards.

He warns that we are in 'Asia's century', and that in India there are parents working all hours to be able to pay for their children to get an education while over here there are thousands of kids leaving school without the most basic skills. "If you have kids who can't read and write to the appropriate standard by the time they are 14, you should have your benefits stopped," he says.

You can have food stamps. But the extra bit, the Sky dish, the fags, that stops until the kids can read and write." There were no gasps of horror from his audience. Lord Jones spoke for a good half hour without a single piece of paper in front of him.

His view is that for British goods and services to hold their own against cheaper, foreign competitors, it doesn't need everyone in the workforce to have degrees and PhDs, as long as everyone can read, write and add up. Tony Blair once said he thought his three priorities were 'education, education, education'.

It sounds as though Lord Jones thinks we can do it for a third of that.