This is not about reducing traffic levels. It is about wringing yet more millions of pounds from the long-suffering driver.

An independent report to be published tomorrow will forecast horrendous levels of congestion over the next 15 years, costing the region millions of pounds and thousands of jobs.

For a start, we should be very wary of such predictions.

We remember vividly the horrifying forecasts of congestion and wasted money which led to the construction of the M6 Toll.

Yet since this new motorway has opened, the haulage industry, having campaigned so vigorously for it, has effectively boycotted it, complaining that the tolls are too high.

Maybe congestion is not as bad as some people would like us to believe.

Yet even if we assume congestion will reach nightmarish proportions in the years ahead, there are far better ways of dealing with it than setting up some Big Brother-style surveillance operation to impose pay-as-you-drive charges on drivers.

What about home working? Or car sharing?

Or how about some truly imaginative and revolutionary thinking?

If the Government and local authorities are serious about reducing traffic levels, then what about providing ample bus, train and tram travel for all commuters during the rush hours – free of charge?

This would instantly reduce congestion, cut emissions and make life easier for millions.

The snag is that it would force Whitehall to increase direct taxation.

How much easier it is to pick off motorists one by one than to grasp this nettle.

Congestion charge? It is no such thing.

It is just another stealth tax from a Government too cowardly to raise the money required and impose a national solution on a national problem.

Hospital bosses must do better

NICE work if you can get it. As we report today, some of the directors at Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley have been awarded pay rises of up to £45,000.

This may be small change in the rarefied atmosphere of NHS boardrooms but £45,000 is probably more than twice as much as most patients earn.

If Russells Hall were a shining beacon of NHS excellence, most taxpayers would grin and bear it.

But at a time when patients live in dread of MRSA and other hospital infections, and when car-park charges are a local scandal, we can only hope the directors are spurred by their pay rises to do rather better in future.

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