IT was suggested in the Echo last week that I was “calling on the Government to ban the private ownership” of cars. Of course I am doing no such thing.

I don’t blame the Echo for reporting this though – it arose from a national newspaper article which quite wrongly suggested that I was calling for a ban.

I complained to the newspaper about this and they amended their piece. The Echo report, I think, arose from the brief period where the national newspaper report was ‘live’ before they withdrew items they had made up about my views: and I’m pleased that the editor has given me the space to put that right in the Echo as well.

But what I have done is to contribute to what I think is an important debate about what we, between us do about our cars in the long-term, if we are not to end up, perhaps in thirty years’ time, if present official car use projections are right, in one giant gridlock across the country.

At that point, even if cars are, as I hope they will be, much more efficient with perhaps mainly hybrid or electric engines, owning and using a one will have very little point to it if we cannot, when we need to, make journeys in them anymore.

So we will need to think carefully about how we use our cars in the long-term future. We will need to develop much better public transport, for example, so that we really can make shorter journeys more easily without getting in our cars, and some longer journeys with better connections to where exactly we want to go at each end without having to rely on the car to get us there. I have suggested, alongside this that we might think long-term about whether we can develop better ways of sharing car use, such as through car clubs, or whether we might be leasing cars in thirty years’ time, instead of having to put all our money into initial purchase, which locks in a choice about how we travel because we have effectively paid for it all up front.

The car, as a very convenient form of transport will be around, of course, for a very long time, and I want it to remain like that. I value the convenience and flexibility for journeys that my car provides me with. But I do know that it is going to look very different for all of us car owners in thirty years’ time unless we can work out ways to use our cars much more efficiently.

Alan Whitehead, Southampton Test MP, Labour.