Pay-per-mile road pricing trials will be held in at least one UK city within the next five years.

A draft road transport Bill, published on Friday proposes to grant new powers to charge for each mile driven on congested roads to at least one local authority with Manchester and Birmingham thought to be the favourites.

The new Government proposal will make £200 million per year available to local authorities that agree to introduce road charging schemes to test the technology prior to a national roll out.

Satellite tracking or electronics tags fitted to vehicles and roadside beacons are expected to be used and any profit is to be spent on improving public transport.

Source: The Times

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Police chiefs have called for the number plate system to be overhauled in a bid to beat “car cloning”.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has warned that an increasing number of car number plates are being stolen or cloned to allow criminals to escape motoring fines or commit crimes without being identified.

The Police estimate that there was an increase of nearly 25% in the number of registration plates stolen last year, with in excess of 40,000 vehicles having their plates snatched in 2006.

Superintendent John Wake of the ACPO Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service told the BBC that there was no confidence in the DVLAs ability to prevent cloning. The registration plate was the “first form” of identification of a vehicle he said, adding “I don’t have confidence that beyond that you can identify that that vehicle is the legitimate vehicle for that plate”.

The Association of Chief Police Officers now wants all cars to have tamper-proof plates fitted and a new central body established to issue vehicle registration numbers.

More at the BBC.