The Prime Minister’s suggestion that parts of Britain’s road network might be privatised looks like it could be a double-edged sword for the UK’s van and commercial drivers.

On the one hand, private investment in new and upgraded roads could provide some much needed improvements.

On the other hand, the promise that road builders will be able to levy tolls on new road capacity (but not on existing roads) suggests that a two-tier road system could emerge:

• Cheap, congested old roads
• Expensive, empty new roads

The M6 Toll provides a perfect example of how badly this system could work. It’s underused because it is expensive. Most commercial and private traffic cannot justify the cost of using the M6 Toll and chooses the slower but cheaper M6 alternative.

This arrangements suits the operators of the M6 Toll very well – their lightly-used road suffers from much less wear and tear than the regular M6 and so costs them much less to maintain than the equivalent stretch of the main M6 motorway.

Proposals to extend this road management model across the UK could simply replicate this problem on a wider scale, rather than fixing the capacity and maintenance problems that exist on the road network as a whole.

It seems, again, as if government policy might be aligned to the interests of the big businesses who will invest in the road network, rather than the millions of individuals and SMEs who need to use the UK’s road network to make a living.