Charging of heavy goods vehicles for the use of infrastructure: differentiated charging

The Commission amended its position by incorporating the amendments of the European Parliament to the Council's position. They aim to:

• clarify the Council's mechanism to vary infrastructure charges at peak periods by adding provisions to guarantee the revenue neutrality and improve the transparency;
• insert a provision on the use of revenues in the transport sector. The provision encourages Member States to invest the revenues of tolls in projects to make transport more sustainable. It shall be deemed applied if 15% of the revenues are used on the trans-European network. Member States will be obliged to report on the revenue raised and on the investments made in transport;
• authorise in mountain areas the simultaneous application of the existing mark-up and the new external cost charges for Euro 0, I and II vehicles and for Euro III vehicles as from 2015. A compulsory "mini-earmarking" of the revenues generated by this combination of charges is also foreseen;
• insert a "rendez-vous clause" based on Commission's reports due respectively 12 and 48 months after the entry into force of the Directive and where appropriate on a Commission's legislative proposal. The content of the reports has been aligned to the recent White Paper on transport.

The Council’s position did not foresee any obligation for Member States to transmit to the Commission a correlation table, in spite of the general line usually taken by the European Parliament on the matter.

However, the Hungarian Presidency with the support of the forthcoming Polish, Danish and Cypriot Presidencies issued a statement confirming that the adoption of this directive does not prejudge the outcome of interinstitutional negotiations on correlation tables.

The European Parliament could thus agree with the Council but with a statement according to which the Commission should inform it within twelve months after adoption of this agreement in plenary and make a report at the end of the transposition period on the practice of Member States in drawing up their own tables illustrating, as far as possible, the correlation between this Directive and the transposition measures.

During the plenary of 7 June 2011, the Commission issued a statement which among others confirms the commitment of the Commission towards ensuring that Member States establish correlation tables linking the transposition measures they adopt with the directive, confirms its agreement to produce the information requested by the European Parliament and stresses that its position followed in this file shall not be considered as a precedent.