I’ve spent the last couple of days mulling over the government’s latest announcement of a pay as you drive scheme certainly there has been plenty of discussion in the press. Ostensibly there is nothing new in this proposal, in one form or another it has been around for some while. The idea of motorists paying per mile as a means of alleviating congestion certainly is an attractive one. I do not have any objection to the principle of paying for roads on a mile by mile basis. Indeed, if this means the removal of fuel duty and the road fund license, the process if applied properly would be fair.
The problem however is that yet again government resorts to mass surveillance as a solution. We are given the usual satellite tracking solution. Every time a “problem” is raised in the public domain, government resorts to the same tired collection of “panaceas”. Whether it is identity cards as a solution to a spurious range of “problems” that in reality will achieve nothing, or this; using GPS technology to track every vehicle and charge per mile on the basis of which roads the driver is using and the traffic density. The naïveté is breathtaking. We’re talking about 30 million vehicles on Britain’s roads. Even if it were technologically feasible the government’s track record with IT projects in the past has been notable for its incompetence and inability to manage them within budget. We are also told that GPS (or more likely Galileo) will be used to monitor vehicles whereabouts all of the time and feed this into the system. Yet the GPS system used for satellite navigation in vehicles is a passive one, the receiver picks up signals from the satellite in order to determine the vehicle’s location not the way about. Therefore the only logical conclusion to draw is that a different system will be used. Something similar perhaps to the electronic tagging used for offenders would be necessary. A “black box” fitted in the vehicle, probably linked into the ignition circuit to limit tampering would monitor the vehicle and feed that information back to the database for tolling purposes. When you consider this in tandem with the National Identity Register and its planned linking of government databases, the potential for abuse is horrifying.
So there you have it; every UK driver will be tagged like an offender. And, given government’s propensity to protect itself, the onus on ensuring that the data is correct rests with the individual not government. If the data is wrong how do you prove that it was not you driving on a particular road at a particular time if the database says otherwise? I am not sure what worries me more, the obsessive desire for mass surveillance of population, or the utter incompetence and naïveté of the government, its agencies and their minions. Either way George Orwell will be spinning in his grave.
—–