Revealed: How much Sadiq Khan's congestion charge plans will cost Londoners
The Mayor of London is poised to increase the capital-wide tax by a fifth – from £15 to £18 – as well as applying it to electric cars and delivery vans.
The planned increases, set to kick in from Christmas Day, will cost drivers of electric cars £75m per year as the Labour mayor brings electric cars into the taxation scheme for the first time.
The increases could total as much as £455m over the next five years, Auto Express magazine reported.
Although Transport for London (TfL) suggested it could add a 25 per cent discount for EVs, that would only apply to those owners who trust the capital's transport authority enough to sign up for its Auto Pay system, the car magazine added.
Figures obtained by the magazine suggested that TfL's internal financial projections showed that raising the congestion charge to £18 and extending it to electric vehicles – commercial delivery vans as well as cars – could rake in an extra £75m a year.
Under current rules, any driver on the roads inside the M25 motorway at the wheel of an older, more polluting diesel or petrol car must pay £15 a day.
Electric car drivers have been exempt until now – but a public consultation that closed on Monday included options for Khan to include those vehicles in the charging scheme for the first time.
Richard Holden MP, the Conservative shadow transport secretary, said: 'Sadiq Khan's answer to every problem is to reach deeper into Londoners' pockets. As Transport for London's mismanaged £13bn debt continues to spiral, it is little surprise Sadiq Khan is jacking up the congestion charge on top of the new tunnel tolls, Ulez, and annual Tube fare hikes.
'It can already cost over £35 just to get to work in London before you've even paid the recent road tax hikes, rocketing insurance costs, and rising fuel prices. It's daylight robbery.
'Meanwhile, more than 2,200 TfL staff are on six-figure salaries. Londoners are being bled dry while Labour's Mayor rewards his top brass and piles the bill on working people.'
The impact of the Congestion Charge, as well as the mayor's hated Ulez emissions reduction scheme, has had a catastrophic impact on ordinary Londoners and the businesses serving them.
David Tucker, 59, who runs a waste and recycling company in South East London with 55 trucks and more than 100 employees said: 'At the moment, Ulez and congestion is costing me £300,000, give or take, per annum, and it's going to get worse.
'We would have to pass the cost onto customers. We built this business over more than 10 years, and employ more than 100 people. We have always played by the rules, but we cannot reinvest now if TfL takes all the profit.
'The margins are really small. We already had to buy new trucks at massive, massive costs. It's no picnic, this business. It's very unfair. TfL, they are absolutely destroying London.'
A TfL spokesperson said: 'The congestion charge has been in place since its introduction in 2003 to manage traffic and congestion in the central one per cent of London during the busiest times of day.
'Without the changes proposed in our consultation, the charge would become less effective, with an estimated additional 2,200 vehicles in the zone on an average weekday.
'Under these proposals, we are also proposing a new cleaner vehicle discount for those who do need to drive in the zone so they would still be able to benefit from a discount if they drive an electric vehicle, with a greater reduction for journeys that are harder to switch to walking, cycling and public transport, such as those made by vans for commercial purposes.
'Central London is one of the best-connected places in the world with high quality sustainable transport options.'
Ginny Buckley, chief executive of electric car sales website Electrifying.com, said: 'Mayor Sadiq Khan's plan to make electric car drivers pay the congestion charge flies in the face of the Labour Government's push to accelerate EV adoption and hit our net zero targets.
'It's a backwards step for London's air quality that punishes those making cleaner, greener transport choices – and risks stalling the shift to zero-emission vehicles at the very moment we need it to accelerate.'
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