BOURNEMOUTH should employ 'the carrot not the stick' when it comes to proposed city congestion charges.

That's the view of the town's central ward councillor who described the measure as 'anti-choice'.

A congestion charge is one of a raft of proposals Public Health England wants to see deployed to cut vehicle pollution, which is a direct cause of nearly 40,000 premature deaths each year.

But Central Ward councillor, Mike Greene, disagreed, saying: "I would need an awful lot of persuading to support a congestion charge, which I feel is fundamentally anti-choice.

"I've always believed that carrots are better than sticks and I believe a congestion charge would be a very big stick indeed."

He maintains the main congestion problems in the conurbation aren't in the centre but come from vehicles travelling east to west or vice versa, with pinch points on Herbert Avenue, Wallisdown Road and Castle Lane.

And, he claimed, he best way to tackle them is through the £100 million the area hopes to receive from the government's Transforming Cities Fund which will be spent on encouraging alternative transport and improving public transport. "This is the largest award that the conurbation has ever received," he said. "I hope that with that we can put in measures that will make public transport an alternative to the car and make it attractive so we would lure people out of their cars rather than telling them to get out of them," he said.

However, he backed PHE's other proposals, including stopping cars idling near school gates, promoting car pool lanes, and providing priority parking for electric cars.

"I certainly approve wholeheartedly of these measures and I'm glad to say that Bournemouth is already looking at a number of them," he said.

Professor Paul Cosford, director for health protection and medical director of PHE, said: "I'm a doctor, I see a figure of 35,000 to 40,000 people each year dying as a result of the harm that is caused by air pollution.

"And what I also see is that the technologies are available, the things that we need to do we know about, so this is a matter of how we take this issue as seriously as we need to and how we move the technologies and the planning and all of that into reality so we actually deal with this problem for us and for future generations."