Pay by the mile...

[pietruszka]

I've just watched a bit of the Wright Stuff on 5 and they had a topic on the Governments revised idea to introduce a pay by the mile system for the roads. The reasoning behind it is this, there are more people buying electric and very fuel efficient cars and paying next to no, if not, no road tax. It's reckoned the government is losing somewhere in the region of 30% on road tax as a result.

The plan is to reduce fuel tax, scrap the road tax and have a pay as you drive system (for those who aren't familiar on here, ie new drivers etc). This would entail having a black box in every car. This sounds great, you pay less on the roads per mile if you drive at off peak times, especially at night. So working musicians could be paying pennies to go to work. However you could be paying a lot more if you work in standard office hours, up to £1.30 (estimated) per mile. This means it would cost my mum about £5 just to do her return journey to her school. It would cost me about £8 one way just to meet my girlfriend for a climb. And that would be at the bottom end of it, there are a lot of people who would pay more.

There are a couple of gripes I have with this. For starters ALL cars should pay a road tax, regardless of emissions, they still use the roads and cause as much damage as any other similarly sized car. Theres the idea that we could all just by more fuel efficient cars, I would love to but theres a reason why I drive a 10 year old cheap car, I can't afford anything else. Fuel tax would have to come DOWN, not just be reduced by 15p a litre. It is an idea to just increase the fuel to accommodate the lack of funds from road tax, so that would price me off the roads and many others.

I'm personally not convinced about this, and I don't trust this tory government to not increase something massively elsewhere to compensate. I only pay after all £125 tax. I cant help but think I'd be paying more on this system and feel it would be easier to tax all road cars.


Thoughts anyone?





Dan

[thisnameistaken]

I currently drive 35 miles to work and back each day because even with the current fuel prices it's about half the cost of using public transport. Maybe this is the government's way of making the trains look like good value?

[discreet]

There's a big civil liberties issue here - a black box in every car (ostensibly for pay-by-mile monitoring) would provide an excellent opportunity for the government to keep tabs on the whereabouts and activities of every car user in the country, thus further eroding any existing shred of personal privacy we still have left.

And before anyone says 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear,' don't bother - that's lazy thinking.

[charic]

The government will make more money, it'll cost most people more however...


[quote name='pietruszka' timestamp='1337159717' post='1656276']
It would cost me about £8 one way just to meet my girlfriend for a climb.
[/quote]

A "climb" eh?

[discreet]

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1337160340' post='1656289']
A "climb" eh?
[/quote]

Anyone for a bunk-up?

[JTUK]

hate the idea myself..and then there is the liberties things as well.

It is just another way to increase the tax pot.... as they don't spend anything like the road tax take on roads anyway.

Why don't they just come out with a simple equation that we can understand..like we need to raise 'X' billions in tax for these fiscal years
to cover this 'Y' expenditure.
Trying to tax a motorist per mile on the basis of road spend and then putting it towards the NHS or elsewhere is plain dishonest sneaky politics.

[discreet]

[quote name='JTUK' timestamp='1337160676' post='1656297']
...Trying to tax a motorist per mile on the basis of road spend and then putting it towards the NHS or elsewhere is plain dishonest...
[/quote]

I wouldn't mind it going to the NHS tbh - but it'll end up paying for Trident, or one of our nasty little unaffordable wars, or more likely in the unimaginably large pile of public cash stuffing the pockets of Cameron's mates in the City.

[pietruszka]

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1337160340' post='1656289']


A "climb" eh?
[/quote]

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1337160660' post='1656296']
Anyone for a bunk-up?
[/quote]

Hahaha!! Didn't proof read that well enough then. I was just having a think, and I'm insured to cover 8,000 miles a year, even if I did 1,000 of those at peak times, which is very likely, I'll be paying way over £1,000 to use the roads! If I pay 1p - 2p a mile the absolute minimum I'd be spending is at least what I'm paying now! That made my mind up and I'm against it. Is this reminiscent of the rates>polltax thing we had possibly?




Dan

[JTUK]

knew I shouldn't have used the NHS example....too emotive.. :lol;

I guess the truth is..we know more tax needs to be taken..but none of us wants to be the ones to pay it...

If we could have a firesale and a bonfire and get rid of a lot of waste..like the quango idea..as that just masks the responsibility from Gov ministries and ministers
then I would be more open to a higher tax/share to get out of this mess...but we have heard all this before..in the form of build the QE2 bridge and then no toll after the bill has been paid off..and then they sell the **** thing which means we give it away..essentially after all the hard yards..!!

[EdwardHimself]

[quote name='pietruszka' timestamp='1337161613' post='1656311'] Hahaha!! Didn't proof read that well enough then. I was just having a think, and I'm insured to cover 8,000 miles a year, even if I did 1,000 of those at peak times, which is very likely, I'll be paying way over £1,000 to use the roads! If I pay 1p - 2p a mile the absolute minimum I'd be spending is at least what I'm paying now! That made my mind up and I'm against it. Is this reminiscent of the rates>polltax thing we had possibly? Dan [/quote]

Probably. Btw this should be in off-topic.

[MrTaff]

Just another scam to get more money out of us, if they did it, my car won't be going far

Edited May 16, 2012 by MrTaff

[pietruszka]

[quote name='EdwardHimself' timestamp='1337161811' post='1656314']
Probably. Btw this should be in off-topic.
[/quote]

I did wonder. I thought general discussion might have been the place to do it and it affects musicians, I don't know. Mods! Move it to off-topic if need be please!





Dan

[jonsmith]

Besides personal driving, I drive about 2500 miles a month for business. I am on call 24/7 and could not utilise public transport and do my job effectively. I work for a small office and we have several people spread throughout the UK in similar roles. OK, we can claim it all back and there might be a bit less road tax and fuel duty to pay, but it's a significant extra cost to for my company to consider & I suspect that the upshot of it would be a redundancy or two (and a severe drop in service level). I'm sure that this would be the case for many businesses, so I'd expect unemployment levels to rise and service quality to plummet as a result. Just what the UK needs! Goodness knows what will happen to the price of anything you can think of when hauliers suddenly have to charge massive rates just to make a small profit.

[pietruszka]

[quote name='jonsmith' timestamp='1337162695' post='1656326']
Besides personal driving, I drive about 2500 miles a month for business. I am on call 24/7 and could not utilise public transport and do my job effectively. I work for a small office and we have several people spread throughout the UK in similar roles. OK, we can claim it all back and there might be a bit less road tax and fuel duty to pay, but it's a significant extra cost to for my company to consider & I suspect that the upshot of it would be a redundancy or two (and a severe drop in service level). I'm sure that this would be the case for many businesses, so I'd expect unemployment levels to rise and service quality to plummet as a result. Just what the UK needs! Goodness knows what will happen to the price of anything you can think of when hauliers suddenly have to charge massive rates just to make a small profit.
[/quote]
This was one of the points raised on the Wright Stuff. It's not just those who commute or use the car for leisure, it's the self employed (like myself) and of course businesses. Namely small to medium businesses.



Dan

[chris_b]

[font=Arial][size=2] [/size][/font]
[font=Arial]Trust the Government to see a problem, reduced revenue from lower fuel sales, and come up with a poor solution. Diesel was always much cheaper than petrol so when more diesel powered cars came along they just they inflated the price so they can get more tax. Petrol is a reducing resource so the Government should be looking at proper plans to cover its eventual demise instead of this crude and pathetic sticking plaster solution. [/font]
[font=Arial] [/font]
[font=Arial]We're already turning down long distance gigs because of the cost of fuel. Any additional cost will kill off what little long distance gigging there is left in this country.[/font]
[font=Arial] [/font]
[font=Arial]Black box in your car? They can link that up to a sat nav and you'll get instant speeding tickets and all the evils that 24 hour surveillance will bring. [/font]

[icastle]

The concept of reduced revenue from lower road tax for 'greener' cars was sold on the basis that it was reducing our carbon footprint.

Taking that concept through it's next logical step, the tax on higher emission cars is theoretically being used to buy carbon credits.
As there's no way that a system working along those lines can become unbalanced (if, of course, it's been properly worked out and administered), the only logical conclusion is that the government are relying on road tax as a form of income.

Reducing fuel costs?
That'll be one of those empty promises used to sell the black box and will never come to fruition.
No government is ever just going to give money back, it'll just find ever more inventive ways of wasting it.

As has already been mentioned, speeding tickets can (read that as 'will') be issued by default and with no mechanism to appeal ('it's on the computer, there's nothing I can do about it').
Also, if you know where all cars are 24 hours a day, you've got another great excuse to reduce police numbers.

Another government con, plain and simple.
I wonder which ministerial lacky is getting a back hander from one of his mates to push this through?


On the plus side, the hurdles to implement this system are going to be absolutely enormous.

Leaving aside the disinclination of the educated public to buy into another set of promises from a bunch of self serving slimey weasels, you've got to get a secure black box into every car, get a reliable reverse feed from Galileo (which isn't even working yet anyway) and that's before you even think about implementing an IT infrastructure capable of managing such a system.

We're talking about a bunch of hopeless no brainers who couldn't implement a joined up NHS IT system, ID Card system or even a comparatively small Biometric Passport system...

[Toasted]

[quote name='thisnameistaken' timestamp='1337160058' post='1656282']Maybe this is the government's way of making the trains look like good value?[/quote]

:-D

[bartelby]

[quote name='icastle' timestamp='1337167275' post='1656420']
We're talking about a bunch of hopeless no brainers who couldn't implement a joined up NHS IT system[/quote]

That would be Fujitsu

[Johngh]

Oh this is nice, how gratious of our lovable government to consider such a thing. At a 88 mile a day commute it mean's at the estimated £1.30 a mile it will cost me £114 a day to get to work.

I'd like to meet the government monkey who thought this up and punch him full in the gob.

I have a very small but nice house in a sunnier climate. If they bring this in, I'm off. And yes, I am serious.

[icastle]

[quote name='bartelby' timestamp='1337167702' post='1656429']
That would be Fujitsu
[/quote]

Yep.
But they were managed by the government.
Left to their own devices I'm sure they'd have got it to work, but add ministerial input and you end up with a white elephant with no trunk and seven ears...

[goingdownslow]

Just a reminder that the car tax banding was brought in by a Labour government.
Since they did that I now only tax and insure my MX5 for 6 months and then SORN it.
Last year the tax was £143 for 6 months and I did less than 800 miles. Some cars pay no road tax and do 1000s of miles.
It's staying in the garage this year as I can't afford/justify it.

[Dropzone]

I suspect this is a lost leader to make us all angry and then they will say "ok we won't do it then" and we will all feel better whilst they sneak something else in whilst we are talking about this.

[pietruszka]

[quote name='goingdownslow' timestamp='1337168455' post='1656441']
Just a reminder that the car tax banding was brought in by a Labour government.
Since they did that I now only tax and insure my MX5 for 6 months and then SORN it.
Last year the tax was £143 for 6 months and I did less than 800 miles. Some cars pay no road tax and do 1000s of miles.
It's staying in the garage this year as I can't afford/justify it.
[/quote]
Yep, this is why I think all cars should pay a road tax regardless. An electric car is more road damaging than a bicycle, yet neither pay road tax.

I'd like to add that this plan is just an idea think tanks have. It has not been put through and I very much doubt it will.



Dan

[bartelby]

[quote name='Dropzone' timestamp='1337169145' post='1656455']
I suspect this is a lost leader to make us all angry and then they will say "ok we won't do it then" and we will all feel better whilst they sneak something else in whilst we are talking about this.
[/quote]

Yep. I'm wondering what's coming up, wondering if the tory media will start on this just as the Brooks court case kicks off.
The Tanker driver's "strike" did well to distract everyone from the NHS bill and the Cash For Cameron scandal.

[Protium]

I was thinking about this today as my renewal reminder fell through the door. £250 for 12 months, and that cost is set on the cars CO2 emissions regardless of how many miles I cover

[u]For private vehicles[/u] an odometer readout should be taken at the cars MOT and the road tax calculated from miles driven and emissions. Fair system for everyone