I say: reread the proposal, please. If charging is only proposed on motorways and trunk routes why is it necessary to start checking up on every street.

I also say: we are approaching the day where every car will have GPS anyway (those that don’t can be treated as vintage vehicles or classic cars or whatever term the DVLA uses to exempt them) and we’ve had complete locating coverage with cellular directioning technology for more than a decade (that’s how mobile technology works).

Halfway measures will do, but aren’t necessary, though we’ve already surpassed that point so technological concerns are an irrelevance.

What is a serious concern is the design of any proposed system. The illiberal option is to automatically lump everything into a central database, while the liberal option is to separate the relevant information required from the details the information comprises beforeor during collection (there are several ways of doing this).

If most congestion is due to people driving to work, then there’s really no need to have a national system anyway. Just let every town/city (okay, perhaps county) create its own congestion charge zone schemes – surely these would largely be less complex than the London one. If there is a national agreement to allow everyone five free days a year or whatever, tourists aren’t penalized for not having a local congestion card (or whatever).

“It is a fact, uncontestable, that this policy calls for a tax shift away from pollution and onto congestion.”

Please allow me the opportunity to contest this “uncontestable” fact. The policy does not propose charging for roads where there is congestion. It proposes charging for trunk roads and motorways only and even then regardless of whether they are congested or not. The policy as it stands would have the perverse effect of providing an incentive to get off of trunk roads and motorways and onto alternative routes that almost always pass through towns and villages. This would increase congestion and pollution in these towns and villages. It would increase journey times. It would increase distances travelled and therefore increase fuel consumption. It would increase noise pollution. In fact the policy provides an incentive both to pollute and to cause congestion. This is on top of the obvious civil liberties arguments. This policy proposal is the worst of all worlds and conference must not sleepwalk into allowing it to pass in its present form.

My point about storing data in multiple databases was merely that if there was a breach, the breach would have limited impact. Contrast that with the government’s obsession with all-singing, all-dancing national databases in which a single breach can put the entire UK population at risk.

However “in that it is entirely possible to develop a system and regulatory framework which would respect privacy and penalise infringers severely.”

Does sound like an excuse for the creation of a myriad of databases as long as they are possible, while a system may be created with good intentions, it only takes one false move and the whole thing becomes quite offensive, human beings are after all, fallible.