Copies have been placed in the Library of the House. I have invited comments on the paper by 10 April. This is frozen until 2007. My Department has not commissioned estimates of the costs of congestion from external sources. A number of external estimates have been made of the value road users might place on the elimination of congestion from the road network.
Some estimates are lower, but agree that the figure runs into billions every year and is rising.
The Department has made estimates of the amount of time lost on English roads as a result of congestion in 1996 and produced forecasts for 2010 under a number of illustrative scenarios. We will be doing more work in this area as part of our follow up to that report. Neither the external estimates, nor those undertaken by my Department, can be translated directly into assessments of the cost of congestion to the economy. This is because they relate only to the benefits road users might derive from reduced delays and take no account of the costs of achieving these reductions. The true costs of road congestion to the economy are the net benefits we forgo if we fail to tackle it.