Safe Speed Forums

As petty as this sounds I'm more interested in how much this so called government are getting from a duty which is "illegal". Surely we should be able to buy fuel with no duty (£1 a gallon?) when it is for use other than on the highway. Perhaps we should run our diesel engines on a gallon of paraffin each time we fill up the lawnmower to compensate for this fraudulent taxation?? (Tongue in cheek!) Has anyone tried this by the way?

I suppse the same goes for karts, generators and anything else with a petrol engine.
If fuel were available duty free to the public for these applications I'm sure we'd see a massive rise in petrol mower ownership, and an increase in lawn cutting activity as it got put in cars instead.
I realise you're making a point of principle, but I'll wager that the answer is that the amounts of fuel consumed for non-road vehicle use is absolutely tiny compared with that put in cars. Therefore, it isn't worth the effort of setting up a duty free scheme for non road uses.

Sorry Rigpig, I do think it's worth the effort to stop these grabbers getting say £3 per week off of each person who uses a lawnmower. Keni

if they don't get it that way then they'll need to get it another. Any suggestions?

Bloody hell! How much mowing do you do?

We probably use 10 lires in total for both mower and strimmer in a year.

.....I use about a gallon a week in the summer to answer your question

The tax rates don't seem to specify what the petrol is used for.
If you can get a diesel lawnmower then things would be different...

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Andrew.

Am I right in thinking you have to pay fuel duty for any fuel you use on the road?

Just the fact you can run a diesel on sunflower oil, which costs something like 2p per litre, add a capful of white spirits to every x litres (can't remember exactly what it is), and then you have to pay the tax man 35p or something for fuel duty...

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Mike

Yes. See the link I posted above for the tax rates.
Vegetable oil is classed as Biodiesel. Note the amount of tax on "marked heavy oil..." (red diesel) compared to 'carbon neutral' vegetable oil... It's crazy.

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Andrew.

This question has interested me, in regard to LPG. From what I understand, autogas is some kind of blend of butane and propane gas, so in theory you'd be able to run your LPG-converted car on Calor gas, which I'm guessing, at least in bulk quantities, would be a lot cheaper than autogas with duty charged.

Is this the case? And how on earth would HMC&E be able to spot it - I realise that they can check diesel vehicles for red diesel, or sniff the exhaust for the unmistakable scent of chips if it's running on biofuel, but how can they enforce a) the tax per litre on biofuel, or b) the LPG thing?

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The bloody great LPG storage tank in the back garden might be their first clue.

Delivery levels of gas that couildn't possibly be utilised by heatibg/cooking alone and no books to show trading in LPG would lead to suspiscions - as would having an LPG pump to do the refueling of the vehicle.


Or are you thinking of using a Calor cylinder a la caravan cooking - in which case C&E probably wouldn't bother - seeing as it will kill you fairly soon anyway.

It was a hypothetical question! Not sure about the LPG cylinder thing - round here, EVERYBODY has Calor gas cylinders in their gardens! And HMC&E would at least have to be suspicious enough to want to check people's gas supply arrangements, or the presence of a suitable pump. Can't see them just wandering around to every LPG vehicle owner's premises on the off-chance...

My personal view on this is that messing around with compressed gas isn't very wise, and it's certainly not something I'd fancy doing, even if I owned an LPG-converted vehicle. But you can count on it that someone's going to do it, especially if it's worth a few quid for them to, and I am curious as to how it can be policed.

For that matter, I'm a bit doubtful about how they police the sunflower oil brigade: presumably, all one has to do is to sign up to the duty thing and pay 'em the duty on (say) 20 litres a week, while happily dashing around the place using 60 litres a week. IF they stop you and get dubious about the chip smell, you show them your duty receipt, and go on your way rejoicing - they'd have to investigate you pretty closely to catch you out. Doable, but not easily. Certainly not as easily as catching you with red diesel in your tank...

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They really have no way to tell the difference between taxed biofuel and untaxed biofuel. As a registered fuel producer I 'converted' almost 200 litres of vegetable oil into 'biodiesel' by writing the number down and paying the correct amount at the end of the month.
It would be possible for someone to set up an account with me, so they go to a shop and buy 12 litres of vegetable oil, phone me and ask me to 'sell' them 12 litres of biodiesel tax and then they put it in their car.
As long as I have that number written down to be paid at the end of the month that should be legal. But the person buying the duty off of me doesn't need any kind of receipt, or at least I don't think they do. How do you know the fuel you buy at a petrol station has had duty paid on it?

The conversion process was purely a legal one, in effect I just say "this bottle of vegetable oil is now a road fuel" and write down the amount and it's legal to use on the road. I didn't do anything physically to the oil. I just put a small percentage of vegetable oil in with 'regular' diesel oil. (less then 50%)
When it started staling at roundabouts I lowered the amount of vegetable oil. And changed the fuel filter. I think the latter helped more.

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Andrew.

I didn't think of that

Duty receipt? The only record I have of duty payment is a spreadsheet I created myself. (which gets backed up regularly) I carried a photocopy of the "you are now a registered fuel producer" letter in the car though.

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Andrew.

Well I have an LPG tank in my back garden, and consume about 3,000 litres a year to heat the house. Now if my consumption were to double then yes it might seem a bit suspicious, but in reality who would do anything about it? I know for a fact that a larger and less insulated house down the road has a gas bill approximately three times mine, so the actual numbers wouldn't trigger any alarm bells unless the increase was overnight. But even if it was, who would tell Customs and Excise about it? Can you see the gas supplier complaining that they are "selling too much gas"?

Secondly, who would actually have a record that I had a gas powered vehicle?

As regards the mechanics of filling it, you could easily tap into the gas feed to the house in an unobtrusive way in order to extract the fuel.

In fact, even if you were to do so blatantly, what could anyone do about it? I can't see it being illegal simply to own the correct gear for filling your car, surely they'd have to catch you in the act.

Which would be damned near impossible if your filling routine took place in a windowless garage, which had a perfectly legitimate gas point fitted for a wall heater...

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Going by what ziltro has said, it sounds as if it's all a bit ad hoc, and that they don't really expect to be encountering massive fraud on this. That said, I'm sure if it did catch on, they'd start being a lot more aggressive about it - and, of all the government departments, HMCE are the ones with the legal clout to be the most aggressive.

What intrigues me somewhat is what technical means they might possibly be able to deploy to control it. Some kind of special "tagged" additive for veg oil or gas, along the lines of the red dye in diesel, only the other way around? Only that wouldn't work, since conventional diesel doesn't have such a tag, and they'd need expensive equipment to detect it.

(I'm aware that we're probably fairly wildly off-topic on this forum with this...*grovelling apologies to the moderators* )

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Paul Smith
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The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I'm just trying to work out how much of the cost difference between retail and bulk LPG is tax, and how much is simply discount for buying in bulk.

As far as I can work out, my domestic LPG is currently supplied by Shell at 32.5ppl + VAT @ 5% = 34.125ppl.

Presumably if it were for road use it would it would attract excise duty (which appears to be 4.5ppl at the moment) and then VAT on the lot at 17.5%, which comes to 43.475ppl which is only marginally cheaper than the forecourt price.

So if I were to use my domestic tank to fill my car up I'd be saving about 11ppl compared to buying it at the forecourt (though it would be 66% less than I currently pay for super-unleaded petrol!), and if I then declared this I'd pay about 9ppl direct to the Government in tax.

So a quick case study....

I do about 15,000 miles per year at about 28mpg, so use about 2430 litres of fuel per year, which at current rates is (say) £2500. If I switched to LPG and bought it all at the forecourt I'd save about £1400, or about a further £260 if I were to fill it with domestically taxed LPG from my tank, of which saving I'd then presumably pay £220 back direct as declared tax.

It seems a conversion costs £1000-£1500, so it seems like a 12 month payback before you actually save any money.

(Less the additional costs incurred by the extra mileage you'd inevitably do once fuel became "cheap").

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
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Yes, I did the numbers and came up with a similar figure. Still, a 12 month payback's not bad - you'd be looking at a much longer payback figure for, say, installing solar heating in your house (before all the recent gas price rises, it was somewhere between 10 and 15 years, minimum - now, it's maybe 7-10).

It's all very dependent on the government not suddenly deciding, just after you've spent your £1500 converting your vehicle, that they're going to whack a lot more duty on LPG, and I see that as pretty inevitable in the longer run.

Which will make the idea, to some people, of starting to use non-duty-paid Calor gas a lot more attractive.

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There is a hitch that If your car gets written off there is unlikly to be any refund of your investment from your insurers.

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“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
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