UK must prepare for widespread road pricing, says infrastructure tsar

34 comments

1. > Armitt said the debate around road pricing would only grow as the government steadily lost revenue on its two main motoring taxes – vehicle excise duty and fuel duty, which together raise about £35bn a year. Neither are levied on electric vehicles.

   I can’t think of an alternative, to be fair. The people who use the roads really should pay for their upkeep.

2. It’s not like they haven’t already figured out how to tax EVs.

   Just yesterday a letter dropped through the door from the DVLA telling me my EV will be subject to road tax from 2025.

   Public EV chargers are taxed at 20% and domestic electricity continues to be taxed at 5%.

3. Not going to be very popular with rural population and others outside of London for whom public transport is something they see in London on TV.

4. Clearly they will need to do something to replace the taxes on petrol and diesel if everyone went electric but my concern is they would replace it with something that is taxed even more.

   Pay per mile is the fairest method as that’s essentially how it currently works since you buy more fuel if you drive more miles.

   But no doubt they will go overboard with tolls on motorways instead that end up costing the average driver more than we pay in fuel duty tax now. I could also see them hammering owners of ICE vehicle twice with both taxes at the same time.

5. Government: we tax things with expensive externalities to discourage you

   Public: ok we’ve stopped

   Government: great but we still want to charge you

   Public: ?!?!

6. If taxing gonna improve road condition, im happy for it

7. Labour are going to be in serious electoral trouble if the very rich get away with it again.

   Taxation on the essentials of life is really just income tax by any other name. Won’t be an essential you say? What with the vast sums being spent on public transport and how good it’s soon going to be…

8. Be interesting to work out how much you pay per mile now via fuel duty and VAT, then compare it to the various proposed rates.

9. lol these people calling themselves tsars like it’s soviet russia

10. How very socialist of them, punish the poorest and most disenfranchised members of the population by pricing them into further into abject poverty.

11. Remind me who elected this guy and why we are supposed to call him “sir”?

12. Didn’t the government just give millions away to another country to fix their roads?

13. Just an idea, instead of paying through the nose for private companies to build then when they bid on the cost being £xBn then after 3 minutes of work go “oh no we underestimated it” we hire the council workers and highway agency staff to do it, yunno public highways built by actual public departments

14. I said this years ago, if they ever get everyone into electric cars ( which I highly doubt) it will end up costing us way more than driving ice cars ever did .

15. Joke is that petrol isint really going anywhere for a while but they’ll introduce this anyway, pretending that it is and get the double duties to throw into National Middle Management Blackhole. Easy money

16. I don’t feel that this is inherently unfair but because Labour are very authoritarian leaning they’ll use this as an excuse to put trackers on every car rather than some sort of privacy-positive based system. They’ll implement the most draconian form of this rather than doing something simple like basing tax off of MOT mileage. Sure people fiddle with MOT mileage but as soon as it becomes tax fraud I’m sure there will be methods and resources for the government to crack down on it.

17. What about cars that are currently free to tax, ie classic cars?

    Will they now be subject to tax as and when they’re used?

18. Im totally fine with this in theory.

    My concern is that our alternatives to cars are weak:

    • Buses barely function outside of a few cities

    • Trains are incredibly expensive at peak times

    • Cycling is largely unsafe due to bad infrastructure

    If there are no realistic alternatives for certain routes, the road pricing should be very very low.

19. The not having anyone non complaint to charge london ulez cameras are ready, along with the blue print for whichever city wants to buy the know how and technology.

20. How is this the system we landed on? What was wrong with the idea of taxing by vehicle weight or Kwhr/KM or something?

21. Has the rise in EVs substantially risen the cost of insurance overall?

22. “We pay for all our other infrastructure services as we use them” the problem is that in rural areas, some ppl, such as myself, simply have no choice but to own & use our own cars, as public transport simply does not exist in those areas. Also, it tends to be the less well-off who live in those areas, so a road pricing scheme would cause more issues for them as well.

23. I won’t be surprised if they start putting taxes on our farts as well. With all that carbon dioxide. We should really be taxed.

24. Government: Emissions from diesel / petrol cars are costing the taxpayer billions per year. Switch to EV to save money.

    Me: So no need to tax them, as they save money.

    Government: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

25. So, since the majority of goods are trucked…. that means prices on virtually everything will go up. Again.

26. UK residents being bent over barrel at every turn.

    Quick! Someone post about another assault.

27. If the government put a tracker on my car to in force a pay by mile scheme I am protesting on the streets. Total invasion of privacy.

    I also hate toll roads. They encourage people to drive on less efficient routes and create traffic.

    Taxing vehicles by weight seems a lot more fair.

28. Well if they spent that money on the roads then there’s a chance the roads wouldn’t be in such a poor state..

29. Why do we have tsars!? Where did this come from? We are not soviet Russia.

30. All those in this thread _salivating_ at taxing EV owners (despite being encouraged to adopt), I can’t *wait* for them to come and tax you more than they already are.  Let’s see how excited you are then. 

31. This is the problem. It’s now an emissions tax, not a road tax. Make it a combination of road and emissions tax that fairly represents weight and CO/CO2 emissions, and then all people can complain about it the price. Personally, I think it’s an easy revenue generator for the government. Maybe they could introduce, as part of the road tax, a mileage incentive.

32. Hahahahahaha

    They’re broke, they need us to pay. But what will their reason be next?

    Also hahahahahaha

33. Road pricing without first improving public transport. Unwise to put it mildly.

34. This is why compulsion via taxation is a terrible idea and never works. Eventually the public shifts its behaviour as “intended” but then there’s no money coming in to the public coffers, so they then have to tax the new behaviour they spent years engineering. If I was an EV driver I’d be well pissed off right now