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Motor Transport has been unable to get government departments to release a copy of the lorry road user charging report that transport minister Stephen Ladyman says has already been published. The report would shed light on what went wrong with the highly secretive and hugely expensive LRUC project. Ladyman told MPs that the "thorough feasibility study" of LRUC, which showed it would cost far more to set up than it would raise in revenue, has been published. The DfT ignored requests for a copy  then said: "It's an HM Treasury report."

An HM Treasury spokesman at first told MT: "I'm not aware of its having been published. But if the minister said that, it must be so." A day later, he said: "We are still trying to work out what Dr Ladyman was referring to." Officials were in touch with his private office about that and with Revenue and Customs, he said. On Friday, it sent MT a copy of the Regulatory Impact Assessment 2005 - a well-known report that is irrelevant in this context.

The DfT subsequently ignored requests for information about the report and a question as to whether Ladyman may have been mistaken when he said the report had been published. Ironically, the government's renewed secrecy comes in the same week as Ladyman's boss, transport secretary Douglas Alexander, called last week for the industry to help it to design a road user charging scheme.