The Department for Transport expects to receive the first scheme proposals from local authorities for road pricing pathfinder schemes next year, with pricing pathfinders possibly becoming operational in four to five years.
The Government also recently announced that they would allocate £10 million for demonstration projects to help us understand more about how road pricing schemes would operate in practice. A Prior Information Notice, which alerts companies that may be interested in bidding for the work, will be released shortly. We expect that the demonstration projects will commence in spring 2007, and that they will run for around one to two years.