I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, but that does not surprise me at all. In some respects, others should not be interested in the issue because it is something for the people of Nottingham; it is not for the regional CBI, or the regional or national chambers of commerce. People in Derby, Leicester, Manchester and across the country can forget about the scheme; if it does not work in Nottingham, I guarantee that nobody will bring it in anywhere else. Nottingham city wants to bring in the scheme and, to be quite honest, we would appreciate it if people who are not involved in Nottingham city kept their oar out.

The economy of greater Nottingham is the largest in the region. It is worth more than £11.2 billion and employs more than 300,000 people. Congestion in Nottingham itself costs £160 million a year and half that cost falls to business, which has been on to me for years and years—I am sure the same is true for my hon. Friend—saying, "When are you going to do something about this congestion?" That is why the first tram appeared in the city.

The problem has gone on not just for years but for decades, since I was a county councillor, and that is one reason why I am an advocate of public transport. It is not that I am anti-car—I want to use my car—but I realise that if we all use our cars at once, the roads will be so crowded that it will be a waste of time. I want people to have the choice of using public transport when they can.

The reality is that in Nottingham, 70 per cent. of congestion at peak time is caused by commuters. The proposal tries to address that. It looks at where the biggest problem lies. It is not, as some suggest, an ill-thought-out idea that has been put together on the back of an envelope. The city council has been looking into the matter for years. I can remember considering what we would do about the problem when I was a county councillor. The city council thought about road pricing, too, although perhaps not in as detailed a way as people would have liked. It rejected that, and came back to the idea of the workplace levy.

The workplace levy is attractive to us because of its simplicity. It is low-cost; it is simple to introduce; and it fits in with the timetable for other transport measures, such as phase 2 of the tram project. The levy is targeted specifically at commuting drivers, who are considered to be the main contributors to congestion. It is a scheme that fits the bill for Nottingham—but perhaps not for ever. I think that there will come a time when we will want to do something more sophisticated with fancy technology. However, that technology is not there yet, and the levy fits us at the moment.

The view has been expressed that the scheme is not about congestion, and that annoys me. It is suggested that it is just a stealth tax that the council has decided to introduce, and that it will not help to ease congestion at all. Again, nothing is further from the truth. The scheme deals with congestion in every respect. Let us look at what it does. It works on the same basis as other environmental schemes—the polluter pays. If a company has no workplace parking spaces, it will not pay any money. If a person never uses a workplace parking space, they will never pay any money. If a company has workplace parking spaces, they will pay for them. If they have more, they will pay more, and if they have fewer, they will pay less.

What will employers do? Some of them will decide, "Let's get rid of some of these car parking spaces." Great! That will mean fewer people travelling to free spaces in the city, and fewer people using their cars, which reduces congestion. Some tell me that it will not do that; I am sure that it will. Alternatively employers will pass on the charge to their employees. They will say, "Okay, you've got to pay the charge." It is not much; it is 70p a place, which will not break any banks. However, if they pass on the charge, at least it will make people think, "Perhaps this isn't the way I should be travelling to work. Perhaps I should use some other form of transport, if that is possible." If they do, that will reduce congestion, too.

The main point is that all the money that is collected is hypothecated. The Government and the council will get nothing. In fact, the councillors are among those who will have to pay the workplace parking levy for the parking that they use in the city centre, which is effectively free. I do not think that many people in Nottingham will mind the fact that the councillors will have to pay.

I want to dispel one of the arguments put forward—the argument that the levy discriminates. Part of the campaign has involved trying to enlist the unions, and people have said, "This is terrible. It discriminates against shift workers; it is really bad for them." Well, they have picked the wrong person to argue with if they want to argue that point with me. I started working shifts in the pits on my 17th birthday. I worked shifts for almost all my adult working life. Until I became a politician, I worked shifts all the time. In industry, when I worked shifts, I did not have a car. Nobody had a car in those days. We did not come to work in a car; we had the pit bus. It picked people up along the route—seven, eight, 10 or 12 miles away from the pit—and dropped them off at work. That is much more environmentally friendly than everybody driving there in their car.

Things have changed, but when I was a shift worker at Toton diesel depot, not everybody got there in their car. Some people did, but everyone who went in a car picked up two, three or four other people on their way to work. There was not a parking space for every single person who went there. Some places in the city—Boots, for instance—seem to have a car space for every two employees. If we take shifts into account, I suspect that they have more car spaces than employees.

That is not all; when I was a shift worker, I resented paying a pound, or whatever it was, each week to the man who used to give me a lift in his car, so I got myself a bike. I did the Norman Tebbit thing; I got on my bike, and I cycled to Toton every week, and cycled back. When I became really prosperous, I ditched the bike and bought myself a Honda 50, and travelled to work in style and luxury. After that, I did not always use the Honda 50. Sometimes, when I became even more prosperous, I used the car, but only when I had to. Most of the time I still used the Honda 50. It was cheaper, easier and got me around. Part of the problem now is that we are not giving people choice.

As I said, the money from the scheme will be hypothecated. It will provide Link bus services so that people who do not want to use their cars will be able to take a bus. The money will pay for new bus services, among many other things. Some of us—I do not know whether that includes my hon. Friend Mr. Allen—were taken aback by the recent flourish of opposition to the scheme. I thought there would be no more arguments about it, and that the people who were against it would shrug their shoulders and said, "Well, it's going to happen anyway. Let's forget about it." I was surprised that the opposition has been resurrected.

The scheme is not something new that has appeared out of the blue. Nottingham proposed it in 2000. It was part of the city's transport plan for 2001-02 to 2005-06. It has appeared again in the present transport plan. It is built into the package of transport proposals. It is nonsense to think that if something is taken out of the package, the rest will still stand. That is not how it works. Most of the transport proposals had the workplace parking levy built into them—for instance, the redevelopment of Nottingham's railway station. A new hub at the railway station is expecting to get some money from the workplace parking levy. If there is no levy, there will be no hub.

Improvements to the city Link buses, which join up hospitals, universities and key employment sites, will not take place if there is no parking levy. The most important thing, to me, is the tram. Everybody has accepted that that is part of our package. Perhaps another funding stream could be found quickly, but I suspect not. I suspect that that would probably knock our application for the tram back a year or two years. Who knows what could happen in these times?

Nottingham express transit phase 2—the extension of the tram system—will join up 1,270 workplaces, to which 45,000 people commute. What a difference that would make to the city of Nottingham. There are a further 600 workplaces in Beeston and Chilwell in the constituency of my hon. Friend Dr. Palmer. His patch would benefit as well.