THE Government's "green" minister, Deputy Premier John Prescott, is evidently engaged in a difficult balancing act in trying to cope with the pressures of transport congestion and that of new homes on the countryside.

But it looks as if the solution he is working on in both cases is higher taxes - one to force vehicles off the road and the other to deter housing developers from farmland.

In the case of roads, where congestion was said today to be costing business £19billion a year, trailers for the Government's transport White Paper, due out this spring, have already revealed plans for stiff taxes on company and shopping centre car parks and for pay-to-drive road pricing.

Now, amid unrest over plans for 4.4million new homes in the next 25 years that critics say would mean concreting over 650 squares miles of countryside, Mr Prescott is said to be drafting a new tax on homes built on greenfield sites to check the flight of people from the inner cities.

New taxes, no matter how well intentioned or necessary - as with these to reduce road congestion and protect farmland - are never popular. In particular, the ones mooted for motorists are sure to be resisted not only because of people's deep love affair with their cars, but also because drivers are already one of the most heavily taxed groups in the country.

To make any of these as acceptable as taxation can be, Mr Prescott will have to make plain at the outset that the revenue is earmarked not for the Treasury, but for resolving the problems he is seeking to redress.

That from roads should be clearly and entirely directed at improving public transport. For that is the most important factor in the equation. No matter how much they are taxed for using their cars, drivers will not abandon them unless there is an alternative transport system that is efficient, economic and attractive.

Similarly, with the new homes tax, the income from it should be ploughed into developing and creating affordable and attractive housing on "brownfield" inner-city sites.

Towns like Blackburn, with its Waterside and other redevelopments, have shown not only how derelict locations can be usefully and imaginatively transformed for new housing, but also how the community-destroying, so-called "doughnut" effect of inner-urban areas empty of homes can be turned around. Extra revenue for similar regeneration of brownfield sites countrywide could save vast tracts of countryside from the concrete mixer.

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