Safe Speed Forums

From the scotsman,


The PM should do this by cutting fuel duties when oil prices rise and scrapping his plan to apply new green levies on polluting cars to vehicles which are already on the road, a former minister has said.

The old fuel duty escalator, which pushed pADVERTISEMENTetrol taxes up by more the rate of inflation, should be dumped and replaced by a "duty moderator", which would allow reductions when high prices at the pump boost the Treasury's VAT take, said Stephen Ladyman.

The Thanet South MP is one of 10 'New Labour' backbenchers who have set out proposals for policy changes to revive the party's fortunes following last week's by-election defeat in Crewe and Nantwich.

Some of their proposals would mean a sharp shift away from Mr Brown's programme, such as a radical overhaul of tax credits to replace the current complex system with simpler flat-rate support; tax cuts on sensitive goods and services including fuel; and ditching unpopular environmental policies like "pay-as-you-throw" rubbish collection charges.

The MPs - including five former ministers and three serving ministerial aides - set out their ideas in separate essays published on the internet by New Labour magazine Progress.

While each is writing as an individual, Progress said their ideas stem from the conviction that Labour must reconnect with voters and focus relentlessly on their aspirations, which have moved on since 1997.

Dr Ladyman - whose 664 majority makes him one of the MPs most vulnerable to a swing to the Conservatives in 2010 - warned that ministers must recognise Labour voters are also motorists and are more likely to ditch the party than give up their attachment to their cars.

"Motorists understand the need to raise money from fuel duty but they don't believe the fuel duty escalator and recent changes to road tax are fair," he wrote. "So let's start the process of striking our deal with the motoring public by scrapping the fuel duty escalator and replacing it with a duty moderator that recognises that when the price of fuel goes up the Exchequer's VAT take increases and the rate of fuel duty can go down.

"Second, a 'green' tax that you cannot avoid by changing your behaviour is not a 'green' tax, it's just a tax. So, in future, changes to excise duty aimed at encouraging people to drive cleaner cars should never bite on vehicles already on the road but always to new vehicles."

http://www.scotsman.com/latest-national ... 4135708.jp

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nigel_bytes

Funny I was reading in the Express today (free hotel copy, not sure if the article is online), apparently GreenPeace are criticising Labour over the road tax increases for older cars. They argue that increasing tax on something people have already bought gives green taxes a bad name.

I suspect green taxes already have a bad name amongst most people here, but it's nice to have the support. You know the policy is a bad one when even the environmentalists are telling you it's stupid.

I don't understand the need to raise money from fuel duty. (or VAT on fuel duty)
They waste far too much money. We should be giving them less money so they stop being so fat.

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Andrew.

Haha, love that comment Ziltro What I don't get about these "green" taxes is that cars only account for 13% of this countries emissions anyway and that's if we are to believe the government figures or indeed this entire "global boring" fiasco in the first place And as Ziltro said, the government's use of money is far too inefficient. I have a problem with the taxation of "non green" cars anyhow. I guess those are ones with the lower M.P.G., so the owner pays more in fuel anyway.

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Currently undergoing training with the I.A.M.

One thing I haven't found an answer to yet about "environmental taxes" is this, what could the government possibly spend any of the money they steal from us on which does not use energy or cause energy to be used?

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Andrew.

I don't understand why people complain about running costs of pointless vehicles like running 5 litre cars in city centres - isn't it a bit obvious that if you're getting 15mpg crawling through traffic for a few hours a day, and your car takes 75 litres of petrol at £1.20 a litre, it's going to cost you a shit load, and maybe you were a bit silly in buying the car in the first place?

Yeah. Anyone who buys anything that's more expensive than it absolutely needs to be deserves to be heavily taxed for the privilege. Because choice is bad. Really, everyone should be restricted to Trabants or, preferably, no car at all.

It's the same with people who buy pointless houses which have a sitting room and a dining room. Damn those selfish idiots. They should pay £10000 a year for every square metre which I personally judge that they don't need, rising to £50000 for the eleventh square metre and above. I don't see how they could complain, since it costs them a shitload to buy and then heat up all that pointless extra space in the first place.

Pay more than you need to for anything and you can expect tax to increase exponentially. That's the message from mpaton2008. It's the politics of envy as you've never seen them before.

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Paul Smith: a legend.

"The freedom provided by the motor vehicle is not universally applauded, however: there are those who resent the loss of state control over individual choice that the car represents. Such people rarely admit their prejudices openly; instead, they make false or exaggerated claims about the adverse effects of road transport in order to justify calls for higher taxation or restrictions on mobility." (Conservative Way Forward: Stop The War Against Drivers)

Nothing to do with "Politics of envy".

At the end of the day, you should buy the vehicle you can afford to run. If you can't afford to run it, then get rid of it, stop moaning, and buy one you can afford. There's plenty of affordable,reliable cars that do excellent fuel ecnonomy. I have no time for people who live beyond their means as a show of pretend status. I have a mate who did exactly that, and despite years of me telling him not to waste his money on high end goods as a 'lifestyle' choice, he now is in the doldrums of insolvency.

But mpaton the problem is that it's not just "5 litre cars in the city centre" owners who are suffering now. I swapped my car for a more efficient, lower tax band vehicle just 8 months ago - if was affordable then and within my means, it does around 30mpg around town and about 45mpg on the motorway. Unfortunately however my choice has been deemed unacceptable because it's not a band a or band b car (it's a current band d or e) and as such the government is going to impose a tax on me in the future for a decision I took with good intentions. It doesn't work out cheaper to just sell it and switch it for a more economical one again because I lose money on the car through deprecation. It just means its now a lot more expensive for me to run, with the extra fuel (which was less than £1 p/l when I got it) costs and new taxes it's just unfair increases.

By suggesting people just go buy a 'cheaper' car is missing the point somewhat... you can't go on saying that forever, people who could only afford the cheapest car a few months / years ago are being priced out of driving altogether, the cheapest cars are not the lowest tax band cars necessarily and as such running costs are increasing for those who have shitty little 7 yr old cars as well as those with powerful sports cars.

I think that any pretence of the taxation of larger cars being a: "Green Tax" has been well and truly blown IMO. If you spend a considerable sum of money to convert to LPG, making your "gas guzzler" one of the lowest and leanest Co2 outputting cars on the street. You still don't qualify for a rebate on the proposed hike in Road Tax..........(OK...I know that they like to call it VED now........but I don't like them to forget what it really is, and I therefore refuse everto use the term!)

For the most frugal motorist you can buy an old(ish) Audi diesel (an Audi 80) for about 900 quid, and then run it on chip fat!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1750734.stm (obviously this is an A4, not an Audi 80, but the principle is the same!)

The chip fat routine is not cheap either. The price, as bought from the s/mart, has increased quite dramatically in the last few months. The supply of waste oil from chip=shops has also decreased as small companies have sprung up that now buy the oil, or they advertise it on ebay !
Going the trans-est route is frought with problems, not least that your house insurance is invalidated by the keeping and use of methanol and the waste disposal costs as well.....
You could always buy it in bulk from a cash-and-carry counter, at 55p/litre.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Mpaton has come up with some daft ideas in the past (eg. 15mph speed restrictors in cars) but I sort of empathise with him here. It has to be said that before the current oil crunch, some people were wantonly wasting fuel in frivolous vehicles. There's a board I visit which is full of Americans, one of whom used to crow about how much gas his truck used - 9mpg. He's not crowing now. One of the three largest selling trucks in America (until the oil crunch) was a Dodge Ram. One of the variants had an 8.3 litre V10 engine!

Closer to home, I myself came to realise that my 2.8 litre V6 4Motion petrol Golf was a liability at the pumps back in 2003. Doing local journeys in heavy traffic, its mpg would drop below 20. It was then that I decided to replace it with another Golf, this time a 1.9 TDi-150. It used about half as much fuel, and for normal driving there was no real sacrifice in performance.

I prefer to take matters into my own hands, rather than whining about the price of fuel on a bulletin board.

However, as bombus says, there's a limit to how far taxation can go before we have no further scope for making savings of our own. Besides, if the motoring public made a mass switch to an alternative fuel, you can be sure that said alternative fuel would become heavily taxed.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the July 19 fuel tax protests. I don't think the govt has much scope for cutting taxes. We'll have a new govt in a couple of years, but even they might not be able to help much.





PS - using chip pan oil in your car, or heating oil, or diesel oil purchased at the boat yard is illegal! - assuming you intend to take the car on a public road.

It is not illegal to use cooking fat for fuel. It is only illegal to use it if no duty is paid. The duty to be paid is 20p/litre lower than for mineral-oil based fuel (although this depends upon personal interpretation of revenue regulations) Currently, according to hmrc, you should pay about 27p/litre tax on vegetable oil. Some say that using less than 2500 litres means you pay no tax. Take your pick, the penalties are a bit harsh. Your vehicle is impounded and you have to pay £500.00 to get it back. If you chose to not get it back, you pay the money in seizure and impound/storage costs. Either way, you pay.

24 billion in fuel revenue annually
70 billion litres of fuel
20 billion litres of rebated fuels
150 million litres of biofuels

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

You would be able to afford to run it if the government did not create false incetives for getting a vehicle with a lesser sized engine. I am not moaning. And by the way, people are not "showing off" "living beyond their means" they just like the rumble of a big V8 and are proud of it and rightly so!

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Currently undergoing training with the I.A.M.

"False" incentives? What are they then?

I think you answered my point quite nicely with your second statement.

Hmmm...

From the HM Customs and Revenue website - http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/otemanua ... 122600.htm

I've had a look at that Act, on the UK Statute Law Database - http://tinyurl.com/47n9l4
Admittedly, it doesn't seem to take into account people using chip pan oil. But, as things stand, it simply states that only un-rebated heavy oil may be used in "road vehicles". I took that to mean white diesel. Does chip pan oil count as an "un-rebated heavy oil" ?

Well, quite.

People have been doing so since 2001, only to find the government intend to retrospectively increase their VED.

Equally, saying that people have no right to squirm because the government intend to up the tax on fuel when it's at a record price is disingenuous at best. Oh, no, they should have predicted these tax rises when they bought their cars.

You don't really like people having fun do you? Any kind of hedonism (e.g. liking the sound of one's V8 engine or enjoying one's car in any way), whether or not it actually has any adverse impact on others, is seen as immoral and therefore worthy of punishment by some, and I think you might be one of them. Pleasure is "sinful" and must be "balanced out" with at least an equivalent amount of pain. It's an attitude which I neither understand nor like.

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Paul Smith: a legend.

"The freedom provided by the motor vehicle is not universally applauded, however: there are those who resent the loss of state control over individual choice that the car represents. Such people rarely admit their prejudices openly; instead, they make false or exaggerated claims about the adverse effects of road transport in order to justify calls for higher taxation or restrictions on mobility." (Conservative Way Forward: Stop The War Against Drivers)

If you like V8 engines, then great. I'm one of them too. Just don't whinge when it costs £200 a week to run a car with one, that's all I'm saying. You have made the choice, you live with the (rather obvious and forseeable) consequences of fuel price rises.