[TW]Fox;16946451 said:
Thats still more - I already explained that the proposal would be that fuel is raised by such an amount that the average motorist doing 12k a year in a 40mpg car breaks even.
So if you do under 12k a year in a 40mpg car..
(...)
These people already charged disproportionately - a 1.6 litre M reg Vauxhall Astra driven to work 5 miles away and back again by a poor, single mother will cost nearly £200 a year to tax.
Do you feel thats fair?
You are approaching it from wrong angle. It's the angle where taxation system appears to be fair, save money to majority of drivers, penalize few bad apples and completely excuse idle fleets of owners from paying. This is point of view of motorist. It looks good to us - those who drive a lot - pay a lot, those who drive less - pay less. Those that come from abroad, use our roads for haulage and transportation, now have to pay at the pump just like everyone else. If that's not fair, I don't know what is. Meanwhile the system is there to obtain money, not make the charges "fair" or save you cash. The current system is good for the system itself, which is what taxation is all about. What you propose breaks the order:
1. Your handful of high mileage, high CO2, high fuel users will never, ever, ever offset sudden loss of idle fleet - hundred of thousands of cars that currently pay their £180-220 average tax and almost never move at all, and under your proposal even if all the cars that almost never leave garages suddenly jumped to something like 6000 miles a year at 34pg they would only pay taxman half of what they pay now. For taxman that's not fairer system, that's a budget hole of epic proportions.
2. The same high mileage, high CO2, high fuel user bracket will be populated almost exclusively by services, haulage, transport, agriculture and spedition sector, which basically means you, yourself, will be paying for their sudden hike in costs every time you put your goods on the conveyer belt at a supermarket or order something online with delivery. Either that, or the anarchy of exemptions and red dye fuel again. All the above also adds to inflation etc etc.
3. You system rewards low mileage users and drivers of economical cars. That's, again, logical from motorist point of view, but completely opposite to the official CO2 targets and related malarky. Not only it actively encourages old folk to keep that 4 litre Jeep he bought 20 years ago for retirement money and only use for fishing runs to the lake and back twice a month, instead of handing it over for Kia Peec*nto under scrappage scheme, but suddenly most of the every day commuters would be better off buying 15 year old Xantia or Passat diesel which you can feed 50/50 with veg oil straight from supermarket bottles as it saves them fuel and tax. Instead of investing in brand new start and stop, ecodrive, greenline, fart gas recirculating, particle gulgulator filtered, dual mass flywheely thingy swinging, skinny fuelsaver tyre fitted, low rolling resisting, fugly grill sporting Golf with CO2 figures superficially lowered by removing spare wheels and every piece of optional equipment and flashing carefully prepped for test ECU software before final lab run. Loss to taxman, loss to car industry, loss to economy, upsets lobby groups, upsets emission targets, upsets predictable figures in board rooms, kills order of universe, kills dolphins, creates hot summers, cold winters, curves hockey stick, cause Al Gore to loose hair and look old, not to mention leaves polar bear mums with their cubs drifting away from mainland on small bit of ice floe to the open sea. Criminal. Murderer!
So yeah. Good plan. For us. Really inconvenient for the current shape of things up there in ministerial rooms though.
