Labour’s latest stealth tax on motorists – will they ever stop?…
Dear Geoff Hoon,
Seeing as your legacy as Defence Secretary consisted of failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost of thousands of innocent lives and British service personnel, you presumably saw Transport Secretary as a fairly cushy number. What you obviously didn’t realise was that your incompetence could still be very damaging in your new role. Smacking an extra tax on motorists is not likely to win you any friends, nor is it justifiable from an economic perspective.
Let’s start with a quick look back at Labour’s record on transport. According to a report by Glasgow and Plymouth Universities released last week, the following has come to pass since 1998: traffic congestion is worse than a decade ago, the investment needs of the railways have been almost completely ignored (in particular to increase capacity), bus services in most of the UK have remained poor especially in comparison with European rivals, tram schemes have been abandoned despite proving effective at getting motorists out of their cars, walking and cycling have been largely neglected, the government is afraid of addressing the environmental impact of aviation and transport carbon emissions continue to rise. Hearty congratulations for Labour on all counts. In response to this abject failure, your response is classic Labour - charge motorists more. And why not! They are such an easy target for fuel tax increases so you might as well heap a little extra misery on them.
Your new scheme will create a faster lane for those willing to pay for a quicker journey on the country’s busiest roads during the rush hour - up to 42p a mile. Cars would be fitted with a transponder which fits to the windscreen and is linked to an account held by the motorist so that the payment can be deducted each time the car passed an overhead gantry. Hmmm. So, not satisfied with car tax, fuel tax and new scams like the showroom tax, you’re now going to penalise drivers AGAIN because Labour have failed to invest in rail and tram networks, forcing people to use their cars and drive on roads and motorways – only to charge them more if they want to travel at a decent speed. Outrageous. Not unsurprisingly, a poll of 12,000 AA members showed considerable public hostility to the idea, with 58% rejecting the idea. Lord Adonis, the new transport minister, thinks this is all a wonderful idea and I can see why – extra taxes for the government!
To be honest, you seem to think that you can take the best of both worlds. To my mind, you have two options: firstly, you can sell the road and motorways to Road Trusts, scrap car tax and let us pay what we are willing to pay to drive on each road (as spelled out by the Adam Smith Institute); or secondly, collect our money through car tax (which should be linked to inflation) and invest it properly so that our roads are up to standard and new ones are built wherever necessary. It seems that you would prefer to sit in the cosy middle and take our car taxes then charge us even more through stealth taxes when you need some more money for investment. Everyone knows how badly short of cash Labour are, but I thought you had learned your lesson about how much we all hate stealth taxes – obviously not.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
Grrrrr! This coupled with allowing councils to decide their own congestion-charging balls… Labour hate the free-thinking motorist, who can go where he wants, when we wants – they’d rather you travelled on their buses, their way. Also, the transponder device is just another way to spy on you, and I’ll be jailed before I have one fitted to my car.
Actually I think that pay lanes and congestion charging are a very sound, free market approach to the inevitable space rationing. Easyjet charge more at popular times, why should not the road system? Or do you prefer the NHS model where because it’s free we get unlimited demand and rationing by queueing?
Congestion charging is not a free market approach – it is a clumsy penalising tax that does not reflect how much you drive or where you drive, which is precisely what road pricing would do. The fact that the congestion charge only covers one small part of the UK shows how ineffective it will be on changing our attitudes towards motoring. How is that free market rationing?!?!
Pay lanes are a disgrace – I already pay my taxes and Labour have screwed up our infrastructure so badly that many people cannot survive without their car, and now they are going to be charged extra to get to work on time.
If only they could be trusted to adopt one system or the other.
When in France the tolls are really just an inconvenience by slowing up the traffic, so a new system would speed that up.
10 euro charge each way from Nice to the border. Pretty expensive at £16 return trip.
But no car tax.
Here, we would get the 10 euro charge AND the car tax.
Ha, nice example. If the government either went for fully centralised funding or fully pay-as-you-go, at least we’d know where we stand. Labour, however, are intent on pushing the boundaries of taxation as far as they can by giving each new tax a different name.
If it were plausible to implement paying per mile you drive, you could abolish road tax and move wholly onto a pay-per-mile system. Thus, your car costs nothing when you keep it in the garage all year round, but you pay tax dependent on how far you drive it. The problem is that most people don’t appreciate being tracked by the tax authorities – nor do they like a tax that can’t be dodged.
A way around that would be to have a two-tiered system: either you pay an annual amount for unlimited miles (which would of course be pretty expensive) or you pay by mile. Of course, then you’d have all the infrastructure costs of setting such a system up, without the guarantee that it would be used.
Privatisation would be nice, and solve the problem, but it’s lumbered with a huge problems: one, the botched privatisation of the trains is still fresh in the memory. I wouldn’t bank on road privatisation being done correctly, and that could turn out disasterously.
The implementation would indeed be tricky and the issue of civil liberties is very risky – but a sensible and intelligent government could still pull it off.
The issue of whether we will ever have a sensible and intelligent government is another matter entirely.
Err … we already have a tax on the number of miles driven in our cars. Cunningly, it also factors in the fuel efficiency of our cars. It is called fuel duty.
It also rises when we use congested roads. Any car that is sitting stationary is averaging exactly 0mpg.
So, to be fair, we should refer to these systems as an additional pay-per-mile tax.
Of course, road tax was increased because there was little scope for increasing fuel tax any more. Now that road tax is (probably) at the highest possible politically acceptable level, HMG is turning to alternatives.
And when the pay-per-mile tax is as high as we can stand, expect a tax on tyres.
This whole debate is, bluntly, arse-about-face.
I accept that transport infrastructure has to be paid for but why are motorists uniquely targetted. Intellectually, surely there’s a case for providing roads and associated ‘furniture’ for free so that people can move about and perform societally beneficial or economically productive acts? Doesn’t society benefit from people being able to drive to work in the morning?
Oh please. It’s HOON. Youy know, widely known as “TCH”. Forget it, it’s a fraud and a scam, and is just testing the water for a new tax.