Currently reading: Road tax rise hits home
Road tax revisions to hit millions of motorists

Nine million motorists will lose out when the government introduces its controversial road tax reforms in 2010, new figures have revealed.Gordon Brown was today accused of misleading MPs in the Commons over the changes, which were only meant to penalise 'gas-guzzling' vehicles. Last month the Prime Minister told parliament that most drivers would be better off under his new scheme. But the treasury's latest financial predictions prove that 43 percent of motorists will pay significantly more.Experts say the exchequer will rake in more than a billion pounds in extra revenue from the scheme by 2011.The Chancellor Alistair Darling only avoided a Commons rebellion last week when he assured Labour MPs he would look again at the reforms, which are likely to hit drivers of older family cars hardest.Today Edmund King, the AA President, said: "This is not a green tax. but a mean tax that will hit millions of hard-up families."Sheila Rainger of the RAC added: "This scheme will take £1.2 billion off the motorist and put it in the Treasury's coffers. The Chancellor must think again."Darling has been condemned for pushing the road tax reforms though under the radar after he failed to mention them in his Budget speech in March.

Will Powell

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230SL 11 July 2008

Re: Road tax hits home

Yesterday on the pm program there was a government minister saying how things have got cheaper, which maybe true, but in the last six months looking at deals on things likr Aygos and 500s these cheap deals seem to be drying up due to the weakness of the pound, the only things which are still cheap are things like the Ka which has an inefficient engine and is soon to be dropped. This though is just one drop in the ocean of inflation.

People buy big cars IMHO to say look at me, though I can understand also the mentality of the fear of being hit by another big car, so if this CO2 thing is true, how about a 1% purchase tax for every 100kgs over 1600, and a 0.5% purchase tax fo every 10g of CO2 over say 150, reducing the thresholds over time? Surely induce lighter aned more economical cars. Gotta go ;o)

RobotBoogie 11 July 2008

Re: Road tax hits home

Let's firstly make an assumption here that there is a need or desire to drive down CO2 and improve fuel consumption (if only because I don't want to restart any of the climate controversy threads here) - how would people like it to be achieved?

It does seem to me that the government - who I'm no fan of - is caught in a no-win situation. Left to our own devices over the last few decades, we have bought ever larger (or more pertinently, heavier) cars, so what fiscal penalties or incentives would you like to see that would encourage you into something a bit greener? None of the Government's policies in this area are new. For example, VED bands have been changing for years now based on deceasing CO2 figures. Anyone who has bought a car in the last couple of years and then been surprised to find themselves in a higher VED band really hasn't been reading the papers, which is hardly the government's fault.

The underlying issue is that motoring has been pretty cheap for a long time, and that is going to change, largely because of world oil prices but also because there will be, whoever is in power, tax based measures that will penalise you if you choose to stay in something larger and more powerful with a higher CO2 figure. The unpalatable - but unavoidable - truth is that motoring is going to be taken out of the hands of those with less money and that the vast majority of us on an average kind of income will be driving something smaller (or at least lighter) within the next few years and probably giving more thought to how and when we use our cars.

The interesting issue is how we respond to all of this? Will manufacturers start to concentrate on cars that are fun to drive but lighter and less powerful? Looking elsewhere on this web site and finding a new review of another environmentally indefensible but just as importantly, crushingly dull and unimaginative two tonne "sports SUV" (the Audi Q5), capable of 0-60 in 6.5 seconds, I can't help but feel that this should be viewed as an opportunity to produce and drive more interesting, more innovatively engineered than the more-is-more cars that have largely dominated the 1990s and 2000s. It's an ideal moment for a 21st century Issigonis to take centre stage.

230SL 11 July 2008

Re: Road tax hits home

From they count the money and do the bullshit:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=199