The Tamar Tolls should be centrally funded
Last week I joined dozens of local residents at Saltash United FC for a public debate about the Tamar Tolls. A large portion of the evening was taken up with arguments about how the Tamar Bridge and Torpoint Ferry Company Joint Committee has ended up with over £40 million of debts. Some blamed COVID, some blamed wasteful spending (such as the new office building) and others blamed poor management.
I made clear that in my view, these are a minor distraction compared to the fundamental unfairness that we should be paying any tolls at all to cross the Tamar. The geography of South East Cornwall is totally unique; Saltash and Torpoint are the only towns in the whole of the UK to depend on a neighbouring city for so many essential services whilst being divided by such a large river. Nowhere else do so many people have to pay a toll every day just to get to work, college, shopping centres or a hospital.
Yet Conservative MPs on both sides of the river have refused to call for the tolls to be abolished and replaced with direct funding from Central Government. This is an astonishing failure of leadership from our representatives, who seem to have resigned themselves to the idea that they could never persuade a majority of the 650 MPs in Parliament to support something which mostly benefits one small corner of the South West.
Governments with large majorities can afford to ignore individual MPs, but small majorities and coalitions force Prime Ministers to sweat over every vote. In 2010, North Cornwall’s Liberal Democrat MP Dan Rogerson secured funding to dual the A30 on Bodmin Moor. In 2017 when Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority, I asked Sheryll Murray to use her position to demand funding for the Tamar Crossings and the upgrade of the A38. She said that she wasn’t prepared to “blackmail” her party in this way so we got nothing, but her colleagues further west secured funding for the St Austell Link Road and the dualling of the A30 from Carland Cross to Chiverton!
If Labour win the next election with a huge majority, Starmer will ignore the Tamar Crossings like every Prime Minister before him. But even if the majority is small, our local Labour MPs and councillors have already undermined their own position by launching a petition calling for cash tolls to be increased! They have given their campaign the misleading name “cheaper tolls for local people” but in fact many tag users live far away whilst many cash users live locally.
Only the Liberal Democrats are calling for the crossings to be centrally funded, and if I become the MP for South East Cornwall, I will not vote for any Labour budget which does not include funding to abolish the Tamar Tolls.
Please sign our Petition via the link provided below ...:
We the undersigned call for:
- The Tamar Bridge Act 1998 and its predecessors to be revoked.
- The tolls on the Tamar Bridge and Torpoint Ferry to be abolished.
- National Highways to take responsibility for maintenance of the Tamar Bridge.
- Government to fund the Torpoint Ferry in order to maintain the essential 24/7 transport link between Torpoint and Plymouth.