Exclusive: The secret plan to charge London's drivers by the mile
Exclusive: The secret plan to charge London's drivers by the mile
Sadiq Khan and Transport for London were on the cusp of transforming the capital's roads. London Centric has all the details.
London Centric can today reveal the top-secret Transport for London proposal, commissioned by Sadiq Khan, to charge drivers for every mile they travel on the capital’s roads – and just how close it came to being implemented.
The pay-per-mile scheme, known as Next Generation Charging but codenamed internally as “Project Gladys”, was expected to be introduced in September 2026, as a flagship policy of the mayor’s third and final term. In highly confidential internal documents seen by London Centric, TfL’s own modelling set out how the move would lead to a collapse in the number of cars on the roads.
Khan now insists he will never introduce a pay-per-mile scheme. He pulled the plug on the project ahead of his re-election campaign following claims by political opponents that Labour was pursuing a “war on the motorist”. This is despite huge pressure to reach the ambitious green targets he has set himself, which will require a substantial decrease in the number of vehicles on London’s roads.
London Centric understands that until late last year, with the mayor’s backing, TfL was pressing ahead with development of the plan, having already invested millions of pounds in the project and the required technology.
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All the details of the top-secret proposals, shared by multiple sources, are now available to London Centric subscribers, including:
How much money Transport for London (TfL) discussed charging drivers by the mile.
How TfL modelling showed Project Gladys’ charge-per-mile would have emptied the capital’s roads, with a vast number of car journeys abandoned altogether.
How TfL spent millions of pounds on the abandoned project.
How Sadiq Khan told TfL to put the plans on ice last summer, ahead of his re-election campaign, after the Conservatives began claiming Labour was persecuting motorists through the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) scheme.
How the decision to pause the charge-by-the-mile project has led to concern within City Hall that London’s air will remain toxic for longer and Khan will miss his own target of reducing London’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2030.
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Back in 2022 Sadiq Khan began warming Londoners up to the idea of per-mile road user charging with a series of public statements. The idea of a “Singapore-style” scheme — a reference to the Asian city-state which has used a tolling system since 1998 — became a feature of his media briefings.
“What I want to do sometime in the future is for there to be technology that enables us to get rid of the congestion charge, get rid of the ULEZ, and have a system whereby people are charged on a bespoke basis,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
The mayor was clear that radical action was needed to hit his self-imposed target of reducing London’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2030, which required a cut in London’s car traffic by at least 27 per cent.
The TfL board papers from March 2022 are clear: “The Mayor has also asked us to develop proposals for consolidating existing road user charging schemes into one simple and fair scheme where drivers would pay per mile, for introduction by the end of the decade.”
Until now, the details of what TfL was working on have never been revealed.
Although London Centric understands that no final decision was made on pricing for the Next Generation Charging scheme, Transport for London’s preliminary model involved splitting the city into three zones: Central London (the existing congestion charge area), Inner (the original ULEZ zone within the North and South Circular roads), and Outer (the rest of Greater London).
The model saw Central London drivers charged £2/mile plus a flat daily £5 fee, Inner London drivers charged 60p/mile, and Outer London drivers charged 40p/mile.
Under the plan, every Londoner would need to have some sort of GPS tracking equipment or mobile phone system in their car before they started moving around the city.
Currently, if someone driving a modern ULEZ-compliant car makes a return trip from Highgate in north London to Fulham, the 30-mile journey through Inner London does not cost them anything beyond fuel and the general running costs of their vehicle. Under the preliminary TfL modelling this journey would cost them 60p/mile — working out at £18 for the full journey.
A delivery driver living in Upminster undertaking a 50-mile return journey to Oxford Circus and back would currently have to pay the £15 Congestion Charge and nothing else. Under the proposed TfL system, their bill would involve 30 miles in Outer London, 12 miles in Inner London, then 8 miles in Central London. This gives a total potential cost of £40.20.
London Centric understands TfL and the mayor’s team had not decided whether the pricing should fluctuate during the day, according to when roads are busier, but the expectation was that the per-mile charging would be in place at least five days a week. All motor vehicles would be covered, and all charged the same amount, although it was possible that there could be a top-end daily cap on the maximum charged per driver.
The modelling that London Centric has seen suggests that 600,000 car trips would be removed from London’s roads every day, replaced by 170,000 extra bus journeys and 210,000 trips made on foot. Some people would start cycling, taking the train, or car-sharing. TfL’s expectation was that per-mile road charging would cause a lot of car journeys to simply evaporate as people realised they were not necessary.
The internal case for the controversial change was a dramatic cut in carbon emissions, rapidly improved air quality for Londoners, reduced congestion enabling buses to travel faster across the capital, and a massive improvement in road safety, cutting the number of deaths and injuries caused by cars.
TfL research found that most work journeys would be unlikely to be impacted by the charge, as most Londoners either already commute by public transport or have no other option than to drive. Instead, the collapse in car driving came from two areas: non-work trips and post-work trips. People, the data suggested, would stop driving to shops and instead take the bus or walk. Parents would stop driving their teenage children around London and instead tell their kids to use their discounted bus pass. And car owners would stop ‘chaining’ their journeys — meaning no longer using a vehicle to run post-work errands or driving to a restaurant at the end of the day.
A pay-per-mile scheme was seen as crucial to the mayor’s target of making the whole of London net zero by 2030. Longer term it was also predicted to lead to a city-wide collapse in car ownership, with many people choosing to give up their vehicles.
Only 54% of London households own a car, a figure that falls to just 40% among residents of inner London. Many of these vehicles are barely driven but their presence outside homes and on driveways means people end up using them for very short journeys, such as the school run or popping to the supermarket. TfL’s modelling suggested per-mile road charging could be the push required to get people to give up their vehicles altogether.
Per-mile road pricing was discussed under Boris Johnson’s tenure as mayor and was also considered by the Treasury under Rishi Sunak – but has always proved too controversial to introduce. There was a huge backlash to Tony Blair’s attempt to roll-out widespread road tolling across the UK in 2007, although the former prime minister’s institute has since returned to the topic and is now trying to convince the government it is needed.
As the shift from petrol to electric cars reduces the income from fuel duty, there is a growing expectation that national government will have to do something. According to multiple sources, TfL and the mayor originally saw the London scheme as an opportunity to lead on the global stage and enact a policy that would challenge the rest of the country – and the world – to play catch-up.
In July 2023 TfL began laying the groundwork for a top secret Project Gladys test run which would see its per-mile charging technology tested on the capital’s roads by the autumn, taking the plans far beyond spreadsheets and clandestine meetings. Under strict confidentiality the team proposed to hire 20 drivers to test the new app and mobile monitoring network, ahead of rolling it out to all Londoners in 2026.
Desperate to avoid word of the project reaching the public or the media, London Centric understands that the transport authority went to extraordinary lengths to keep it quiet. They budgeted £200,000 on a top secret six week trial, renting cars for the 20 participants to drive to and from work. Everyone involved would be given an iPhone and an Android device to test the Project Gladys app on both operating systems.
In order to retain secrecy, the drivers would be banned from allowing any passengers in their vehicles or using them for personal trips. They would have to sign non-disclosure agreements and the app would be designed to ban screenshotting.
According to the TfL paperwork there was a clear route towards the introduction of per-mile road charging: following the trial, public consultations would take place throughout 2024, signage across London would be replaced in 2025, and following the final nod from Khan, the capital’s drivers would be charged by the mile from September 2026.
By August 2023, Transport for London was ready to ramp up development. Early work on the phone app that would charge London’s drivers by the mile had been underway since the start of the year. The next stage was planned for January 2024, when TfL would start spending up to £200m on the project, hiring hundreds of staff to bring the scheme to life.
Yet just as TfL was preparing for that final push, a series of political events suddenly changed the dynamic. In July 2023 the Conservatives were fighting to retain the outer London parliamentary constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in a by-election called following Boris Johnson’s departure from the House of Commons.
In a febrile political atmosphere and under the daily scrutiny of the national press, the Tories ran a campaign that capitalised on local opposition to the looming expansion of the ULEZ charge. The policy would charge drivers of older, polluting vehicles £12.50 a day to use their cars in the area. Alongside this, protests against road closures for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) from vocal residents and businesses were inflamed by rapidly-spreading conspiracy-laden claims about plans to impose “15 minute cities” on the population.
A few days before the Uxbridge by-election Richard Holden, the Conservative roads minister, stood up in parliament and not-so-subtly put details of a private meeting with Khan’s deputy mayor Seb Dance on the parliamentary record, suggesting that City Hall was looking at per-mile road charging across the capital. The Tories eventually beat Labour by just 495 votes.
At a national level, Labour strategists trying to guide Keir Starmer into Downing Street were deeply worried by the result. Opposition to charging people to drive their cars, whether it was linked to emissions or road pricing, had become a political rallying cry.
Two sources have told London Centric that Khan faced pressure to drop per-mile road charging in the capital because it could harm Labour’s chances across the country. We haven’t been able to independently verify that and Khan’s team did not comment on the claim. But Khan himself was also facing a re-election campaign in May 2024, which was not a foregone conclusion. Susan Hall, his Conservative opponent, was seen as weak but political upsets were not unfamiliar, especially where they involved “culture war” issues. And the high use of cars in London’s outer boroughs, and increasingly organised and vocal road activists, suddenly seemed like a credible risk factor.
Conservatives on the London Assembly continued to raise questions about road pricing to press home their political advantage. At some point between the by-election and Mayor’s Question Time on 14 September 2024, London Centric understands that Khan’s team asked TfL to stop work on Next Generation charging. Khan then publicly declared that "while I am mayor, there will be no pay-per-mile scheme".
Khan later presented the abandonment of this policy as a triumph, a sign that the ULEZ expansion had been so successful it was no longer needed to clean up London’s air pollution. In reality, according to sources, it now seems the sight of vigilantes blowing up ULEZ cameras and the Uxbridge by-election helped sway the policy decision.
Aside from huge political opposition to road-charging on principle, big questions remain over how per-mile road charging would have operated, including what would happen to drivers who do not have smartphones, or if a phone battery has died. There would have been calls from special interest groups and vulnerable people who rely on car transport to create opt-outs. NHS staff and hospital patients were expected to cause headaches. The taxi industry would have been deeply upset.
But the fear among many of the staff at TfL and City Hall that London Centric has spoken to is that a brief period of political weakness led the mayor to abandon a policy that could have radically changed London – boosting public transport, improving the health of Londoners, and cleaning up the city’s air. London showed other global cities how to do congestion charging under Ken Livingstone in 2004, a policy that was highly controversial at the time. If Khan wants to meet his net zero target then there needs to be a rapid decline in the number of miles driven on London’s roads — and it is not clear that there is any other plan to achieve this.
A spokesperson for Sadiq Khan told London Centric he is “committed to achieving net-zero carbon in the capital by 2030”, claiming “London is now leading the way in so many areas”. They listed the introduction of electric buses and taxis, the Superloop bus network, and constant improvements to walking and cycling infrastructure: “After the expansion of the ULEZ London-wide, London now has the largest clean air zone in the world.”
Khan’s team also suggested he needed external support to reduce carbon emissions: “The mayor has always been clear that he cannot deliver or fund the transition alone, which is why he is working closely with boroughs, national government, anchor institutions, businesses, the finance community, Londoners and other stakeholders to mobilise the scale and speed of action required to reach net zero by 2030.”
A TfL spokesperson, said they had been transparent in how they approached per-mile charging: “We have investigated different policy options and carried out work that has included looking at trials of distance based charging in other cities, but such a scheme has not been developed as a proposal in London. Pay-per-mile charging has been ruled out by the Mayor and no such scheme is on the table or being developed.”
The decision to pause London’s per-mile road charging scheme, and the impact on his legacy, was ultimately Sadiq Khan’s.
As he said under questioning from Conservative Assembly Member Emma Best in September 2023: “TfL will look at lots and lots of things. I will not do lots and lots of things. I will do what I want to do. TfL advises. I decide.”
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Superb, illuminating journalism. Thank you for reporting so clearly.
I'd support this move as a commuter and non car owner, but I completely understand why Mayoral leadership has completely dropped their bid for this given the freak out that happened over ULEZ.