Vehicle Excise Duty

[Trifid]

Can you imagine the uproar (and maybe riots) if fuel duty went up enough to cover the lost revenue from scrapping VED?

For reference, in 2010 fuel tax revenue was £27bn, compared to VED revenue of £5bn.

I expect fuel will be around 10p more expensive per litre? And VED will have to be phased out and you'll obviously have people stock piling fuel just before the cut over (maybe phase in the increase over a month?).

Haulage businesses would be very hard hit though.

Perhaps a tax incentive can be bought in for them to help balance the books?



There are other benefits to having higher fuel prices too. People will be less likely to work far away from home and even better may be encouraged to work from home if possible. Those that live closer to work may also seek other methods of travelling such as cycling.

 

[xMarkie]

Being a petrolhead I am quite astonished about how everyone is beating up the wrong bush in this thread.

The changes from engine size based VED rates to emission rates is sensible and reflects the potential environmental damage that particular vehicle can cause.
Zero rate VED vehicles are there because they have been deemed to have such a low enough emission that if more motorists owned them we wouldn't have to worry about the effects.
This boils down to CHOICE - if you want a flashy £100k sports car that has a supercharged 6 litre engine and barely manages 9 miles to the gallon - then you got to pay a **** load of tax - sounds fair. On the other end of the scale if you are just interested in getting a car to take you from A to B and back and not interested in showing off how large your peperami is, you can get a Zero VED rate car - job done.
Disgruntled because you are paying a lot of road tax? Get a more efficient car in a lower VED band - simples.

VED is fixed because how better would you mesaure your impact on the environment? Would we tie a balloon to our exhaust pipe and at the end of the year take it to the post office to measure how much CO2 we emitted? So until someone invents a 100% reliable method of measuring your cars 'actual' CO2 emissions which doesn't involve £10k worth of laboratory equipment in your boot - fixed rates are here to stay.

The CO2 emissions of a vehicle are not 'made up' by the manufacturer - it is independently measured under strict conditions in an independent laboratory. The only things manufacturers are allowed to make up is how good their cars are and the mpg printed in the brochure.

So why don't we scrap road tax...? Well who pays for the UK road network to be maintained? Or that new bypass to be built so you can get home from work 3.5 minutes quicker... will fuel duty cover that alone? What if people stop using their cars or get electric vehicles?

I am hoping road tax will be revamped and a 'Pay as You Drive' charging system introduced which would be fairest and the technology to run it already exists. Obviously the rates you pay per mile will still be dependant on your engine size, time of day and type of road used. So someone using their V8 RR to drive to the shops once a week won't be paying more road tax than someone driving 25K miles in their 1.0 Micra. And also, showroom tax should increase in that case, so everyone well off enough to be buying a new car makes a contribution to the additional congestion & environmental damage it will be causing. Fuel duty needs to come down or be frozen.
For those prepared to pay more for petrol you will have your chance if car ownership in China & India continues to soar.


Remember owning a vehicle and driving is not a basic human right but a privelege. There still are people on this planet who have to walk a whole day just to get clean drinking water because our car use is heating up the planet and exhausting water supplies... and here we are arguing over an extra £50 we have to pay on road tax because of our gas guzzler......

 

[Jokester]

You're completely missing the point xMarkie. CO2 emissions is directly linked to how much fuel you use. Engine size only has an indirect impact.

 

[OpenToSuggestions]

You're completely missing the point xMarkie. CO2 emissions is directly linked to how much fuel you use. Engine size only has an indirect impact.

Indeed - He is way off the point!

I am hoping road tax will be revamped and a 'Pay as You Drive' charging system introduced which would be fairest and the technology to run it already exists.

Someone using their V8 to go to the shops once a week is paying less tax than the person doing 25,000 miles in a Micra - Every litre of fuel is about 70p tax!
The road tax amount means very little in the annual cost of owning a vehicle. The vast majority of people get screwed for fuel tax many times more than road tax.

I do hope people realise the best way to reduce CO2 is to reduce the amount of fuel burnt in the first place .

 

[xMarkie]

You're completely missing the point xMarkie. CO2 emissions is directly linked to how much fuel you use. Engine size only has an indirect impact.

Sorry I don't understand what you're trying to say.

 

[xMarkie]

Indeed - He is way off the point!

Someone using their V8 to go to the shops once a week is paying less tax than the person doing 25,000 miles in a Micra - Every litre of fuel is about 70p tax!
The road tax amount means very little in the annual cost of owning a vehicle. The vast majority of people get screwed for fuel tax many times more than road tax.

I do hope people realise the best way to reduce CO2 is to reduce the amount of fuel burnt in the first place .

Well thats repeating what I said?
Use you car less = less fuel burnt = less CO2 emitted
OR
Buy a more efficient car
Use the car the same = less fuel burnt = less CO2 emitted

Am I talking Chinese or something?

 

[Jokester]

Sorry I don't understand what you're trying to say.

VED is currently based on CO2 emissions of a vehicle. The CO2 emissions that YOU actually produce is purely down to how much fuel you burn. If it was a genuine green tax, it would be purely added to existing fuel taxes, encouraging people to either get a greener car, or do less miles.

 

[Glaucus]

It does seem silly.
I still think it should all be on fuel. Covers mileage, foreigners and less people will avoid it.
Also can get rid of all the pen pushing and enforcement jobs. That must waste a large % of the revunue.

However saying that it's a fairly easy way to encourage us, to buy more economical vehicles. With a upfront price people think about, rather than costs spread over a long time, which people generally do not give much thought to. So I can sort of see the sense in it, it's just an old fashioned system that's hard to enforce and wastes so much money.

 

[Conscript]

Charge vehicle excise duty on physical vehicle size. This would increase the total income from vehicle excise duty as we'd stop all the superecotrollcars playing the system and getting £35 a year duty for doing 40k a year in a large saloon car.

Use the saving to reduce fuel duty.

Here ends pipe dream

Base it on kerb weight (if you didn't already mean that rather than physical size) and put it toward funding the maintenance of the road networks. Heavier cars which do more damage pay more for the privilege. And manufacturers start to develop more lightweight materials, making cars lighter and therefore more fuel efficient by default.

 

[atpbx]

You already pay more tax through doing more mileage, there is no argument to have here.
If you burn more, you pay more.

The VED is plain and simply an outmoded unwarrented tax these days.

 

[OpenToSuggestions]

Well thats repeating what I said?
Use you car less = less fuel burnt = less CO2 emitted
OR
Buy a more efficient car
Use the car the same = less fuel burnt = less CO2 emitted

Am I talking Chinese or something?

You are talking about doing road tax on a pay-as-you-drive scheme.
My point is that VED is a stupid scheme that does nothing but raise money.

Also, talking about taxing driving is a tough topic.
Yes, driving used to be a luxury, when everyone lived near their work, but in modern times people have no choice but to commute to work. In the USA if you don't drive then you simply can't go anywhere.

I am all for taxing the hell out of things such as booze and fags, but for the vast majority of people we don't want to drive to work, we have to.

The VED is plain and simply an outmoded unwarrented tax these days.

Agreed. The UK is in dire need of some tax cuts to the fuel as it is simply making the country not competitive with the rest of the world.

 

[OpenToSuggestions]

The CO2 emissions that YOU actually produce is purely down to how much fuel you burn.

Having a heavy foot is taxed too then I suppose .

 

[Tute]

Being a petrolhead I am quite astonished about how everyone is beating up the wrong bush in this thread.

The changes from engine size based VED rates to emission rates is sensible and reflects the potential environmental damage that particular vehicle can cause.
Zero rate VED vehicles are there because they have been deemed to have such a low enough emission that if more motorists owned them we wouldn't have to worry about the effects.
This boils down to CHOICE - if you want a flashy £100k sports car that has a supercharged 6 litre engine and barely manages 9 miles to the gallon - then you got to pay a **** load of tax - sounds fair. On the other end of the scale if you are just interested in getting a car to take you from A to B and back and not interested in showing off how large your peperami is, you can get a Zero VED rate car - job done.
Disgruntled because you are paying a lot of road tax? Get a more efficient car in a lower VED band - simples.

There's an awful lot of opinion there that you're trying to pass off as fact.

 

[Mucky_Pup]

I wish it was scrapped and loaded onto fuel instead.

I don't even know why you even have to have a physical disc in your car anymore? This isn't the 1950's, it's 2012 ffs.

 

[OpenToSuggestions]

And manufacturers start to develop more lightweight materials, making cars lighter and therefore more fuel efficient by default.

Which is also bad for the enviroment as fancy alloys and composite materials are harder to separate for recycling. Remember there is the End-Of-Life directive in force now that says a very large amount of a vehicle must be recylable. Not directly relevant to the thread but an interesting point imo.

(Source: Wikipedia)
As of Jan 1, 2006: Reuse & Recycling 80%, Reuse & Recovery 85%
As of Jan 1, 2015: Reuse & Recycling 85%, Reuse & Recovery 95%

 

[Jokester]

Having a heavy foot is taxed too then I suppose .

Well, yeah fuel tax encourages people to have a more efficient driving style as well, which VED doesn't.

 

[Conscript]

Which is also bad for the enviroment as fancy alloys and composite materials are harder to separate for recycling. Remember there is the End-Of-Life directive in force now that says a very large amount of a vehicle must be recylable. Not directly relevant to the thread but an interesting point imo.

(Source: Wikipedia)

As of Jan 1, 2006: Reuse & Recycling 80%%,, Reuse & Recovery 85%

As of Jan 1, 2015: Reuse & Recycling 85% Reuse & Recovery 95%

Development means more than just making the physical properties of the material desirable. Who's to say that we wont be able to make materials that are both light and easy to recycle eventually?

And besides, I'm sure there will be a break even point. You need to weigh up the negative environmental impact of recycling the materials in a lightweight car when it reaches the end of it's lifespan against the positive environmental impact of better fuel efficiency that those same materials have allowed it to attain during the course of said lifespan.

Whilst your criticism is essentially correct, I don't believe it's strong enough to refute that encouraging car manufacturers to make cars lighter is a good thing in the long term.

 

[OpenToSuggestions]

Development means more than just making the physical properties of the material desirable. Who's to say that we wont be able to make materials that are both light and easy to recycle eventually?

And besides, I'm sure there will be a break even point. You need to weigh up the negative environmental impact of recycling the materials in a lightweight car when it reaches the end of it's lifespan against the positive environmental impact of better fuel efficiency that those same materials have allowed it to attain during the course of said lifespan.

Whilst your criticism is essentially correct, I don't believe it's strong enough to refute that encouraging car manufacturers to make cars lighter is a good thing in the long term.

It is more that people don't look at the 'full life cycle' of the car. For arguments sake we could say a certain metal is used in the engine which allows for 3kg of mass to be saved on the car, but this metal could be mined in Mexico from a valley killing wildlife, shipped to china for processing, then shipped to the UK for manufacture. It is just that we all focus on the use phase of the vehicle.

You are correct, but for all we know one change to improve weight may have have an environmental effect 100 times worse than if the weight was not saved in the first place.

There is absolutely no point improving one part of the life cycle of the car i.e. the use phase, to just shift all the environmental damage into another phase i.e manufacture, resource extraction, end-of-life .
This is my view on electric cars - People are saying OMG THEY RELEASE NO CO2!!! When they are getting charged up from a coal fired power plant. Not quite as clean as they are made out to be!

 

[Glaucus]

We focus on the use phase as consumers. EU focuses on the life cycles. Which are getting stricter all the time.

Users can't really focus on life cycle on such a complicated machine.
It's not like meat, where you can buy from local farm and know it was born, raised and killed there.
It's has 10s of thousands of parts, which is why it's better left to law makers, which they are doing.

 

[acemastr]

A little off-topic... but surely the CO2 figure given by manufacturers is the HIGHEST amount of CO2 that can come out of your exhaust, I can't see my car producing 230g/km when i'm pootling along at 2500rpm, at 6k I could imagine it.