Car tax to be abolished !!!!!!!!!

[wardroom]

I read with interest news that the gov are looking into the abolition of the vehicle tax choosing to get the money via tolls.

Blinking crazy idea but what do you expect from these buffoons.

Secondly one of my family recently purchased a Hyundai i10 blue which has no car tax due to its low emissions.
The car manufacturers have acted on the worlds emission problems by designing engines to conform and now they move the goal posts.

Probably never gonna happen but I would not trust them in the long run.

 

[Elapid]

They keep suggesting it every year and have done for 10+ years it will probably happen eventually but not for years yet.

What would be simpler would be to just have an insurance tax of the same amount that way all the admin is done by insurance companies instead so would save the government a fortune.

It's not like we need tax discs any more as the police can check if a car is taxed instantly with numberplate recognition.

 

[Louise-Paisley]

You can bet if they do abolish it it basically means that mr average will be paying 50% more LOLOL

 

[nanscombe]

What's the point of an emission based tax if more and more people just get exempt vehicles?

They've got to keep the money rolling in some how. :twisted:

 

[Eric The Viking]

I've just re-taxed the Landy. Its current engine is a 2.5L TDi, but it usually does less than 1000 miles/year. Tax: £225. The whole 'low emissions' thing annoys me as a consequence!

There should be some measure of use in vehicle taxation, and it's probably best put on fuel or road tolls, even though I don't like the idea. The trouble is, it's too low for commercial vehicles. Yes, I know hauliers complain, but cheap fuel has driven freight off the railways, to the detriment of everyone's quality of life and small businesses.

We live in a prosperous suburb of Bristol. My wife is just about to do a 9 mile round trip to Asda, because it's slightly cheaper than Waitrose, literally round the corner (before you ask, there's no point in me arguing about it!). She'll use around 0.75litres of fuel, probably about £1.20 of car expense overall and 1/2 hour of her time travelling (against 8 mins. walking to Waitrose and back).

There's a pair of ruts worn in the slow lane of the westbound M4 from the M25 to Pembrokeshire (it's worst on the English bit). This is from long haul freight lorries that come here from France en route to Ireland. They don't fill up here as they have long-range tanks, nor pay other than Severn Bridge tolls (some even drive round, and anyway they only pay one-way!).

Motorway carriageway repairs are £70,000/lane/mile (2007), not including disruption costs to traffic, so that's a lot of revenue we need but aren't getting.

If freight was charged sensibly, and car mileage was too, distribution would be out from the railheads, and Asda would be more expensive, resulting in fewer vehicle miles, and a walk to the shops for us. And I think charging foreign hauliers is long overdue.

E.

Edit: I had the wrong number above: road repairs were per mile not km.
That means just resurfacing the English bit of the M4 from the M25 west would be £7-10m though!

 

[Sheffield Tony]

I suppose the logic is that with many things (water, for example) charging for the amount you use rather than a flat rate has cut usage. Whether it will work with road tax, where the road tax is a relatively small part of the overall cost of car ownership, I doubt. Moreover, it assumes you have a means of metering usage; stopping people at booths may work on the long open roads in the US but causes chaos in the UK - witness the Dartford crossing. So they look for a technological solution, with some sort of GPS tracking being the best we can do at the moment. But it needs to be tamper proof - it must know the difference between the car being in the garage, or the GPS antenna wearing a tinfoil hat ! And call me paranoid, but I wonder how many years it would be before a whole host of organisations have the legal right to access the tracking data from your car ?

 

[Harbo]

I thought I read somewhere that they were increasing the band rates as they are losing money because car manufacturers were bringing the emissions down with engine improvements?

Rod

 

[Dibs-h]

Just wait till they get round to taxing breathing and getting laid! :roll:

Dibs

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Just wait till they get round to taxing breathing and getting laid! :roll:

Dibs

PAYF?

 

[Louise-Paisley]

Just wait till they get round to taxing breathing and getting laid! :roll:

Dibs

PAYF?

 

[Dibs-h]

Just wait till they get round to taxing breathing and getting laid! :roll:

Dibs

PAYF?

I wasn't thinking procreation - more recreation. :wink:

 

[Wildman]

Car tax WAS abloished back in the early 1970's when it was approaching £250, extra tax was added to fuel to offset the governments income and make sure that those who used it most paid the most, deemed to be a fairer system at the time and everyone welcomed it. The disk was retained along with an annual admin charge of £5 to check the tax and insurance documentation. that has be conveiniently forgotten, checking can now be done via computer so the current system no longer required for that. As for repacing with tolls that is just another money making scheme that will hit the motorist harder yet again. It will also increase the cost of living for everyone. more rip off ideas from rip off politicians who have no regard for anyone but themselves.0
Am I really the only person who remembers this.???????????????????????

 

[Phil Pascoe]

April '75 it was £25, with moves afoot tom raise it to £40, apparently.

 

[wobblycogs]

The sooner it's abolished the better IMHO it's a daft tax. We already have an excellent tax, fuel duty, that charges people more for driving more miles and or for having a less fuel efficient vehicle. These are exactly the things that we are trying to target and it doesn't involve an expensive toll system or tracking everyone's every move.

The treasury have already advised the Government that cars which are zero rated for road tax will cost the Government (in lost revenue) nearly half a billion a year within 10 years - since there's no way on earth they'd give up that much money I'd say the end of road tax is less than ten years away.

Whichever way you cut it we've got to reduce the amount we drive and start to use more efficient means to transport stuff from A to B. Whether you believe in global warming or not you can't deny that oil will run out one day. I'd much rather be living in a country that has slowly adapted, over lets say 25 years, to reduced fuel availability than to suddenly wake up one day and find we can't afford to ship food about.

 

[RogerS]

The sooner it's abolished the better IMHO it's a daft tax. We already have an excellent tax, fuel duty, that charges people more for driving more miles and or for having a less fuel efficient vehicle. These are exactly the things that we are trying to target and it doesn't involve an expensive toll system or tracking everyone's every move.

+1. Commonsense. Which explains why the Govt will spend £100bn on a countrywide toll system that won't work.

.......Whether you believe in global warming or not you can't deny that oil will run out one day. .....

Sooner than you think after Japan announced that they were closing ALL their nuclear plants. That energy has to come from somewhere.

 

[Tom K]

Car tax WAS in the early 1970's when it was approaching £250
Am I really the only person who remembers this.???????????????????????

Whoever was nipping down the P.O for you was definately pulling your pants down

 

[MickCheese]

Surely putting the duty on fuel penalises those living in rural locations. No real problem for me living in a town and working in London with reasonable transport links.

Mick

 

[RogerS]

Surely putting the duty on fuel penalises those living in rural locations. No real problem for me living in a town and working in London with reasonable transport links.

Mick

Yes and No. Same argument could be applied to anyone who's job involves a lot of travel. Or someone who is still working but prefers to live in the countryside. Both personal choices, to a certain extent.

Then you also need to define rural locations as that also depends where you are in relation to where you need to be - if you get my drift! We live in a rural location yet have a town within 5 miles with two supermarkets. A weekly trip is neither here nor there....and that's what most people round here on lower incomes also do. I would hazard a guess and say that quite a few people local might do maybe 2000 miles a year tops. Most of the cars are elderly (like the occupants) so say £200 a year road tax. How much extra tax would they put on fuel ? 1p a litre? Would have to get to 10p a litre to break even with road tax.

Mmmmm...maybe you're right !

 

[Eric The Viking]

That one is easy: Keep an element of car tax, so that you can subsidise rural car ownership, if that is appropriate.

Ten feet away from me presently there is a traffic jam. Because of the council's stupidity with a new road scheme it's now there for about six hours every day. At this time of day the vast majority of vehicles are single occupancy, commuters who mostly work in offices. There's a bus to the centre of town every fifteen minutes from 0700h until about 2200h.

My locality is duplicated in thousands of places across the country. Something has to stop this lunacy!

 

[wobblycogs]

The problem with keeping an element of road tax while increasing the duty on fuel is that as road tax drops it becomes economical to collect it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the total collection cost for road tax is £10 or more per car. Taking my gas guzzler as an example: road tax is currently £170, if that was halved to £85 nearly 12% of the tax would be spent just collecting the tax!

I know this will go down like a lead balloon but why should be we subsidize (directly or indirectly) people living in rural communities? The cost of most services is going to be more expensive in rural locations, the people there should take that into account and, if they don't like it, do what we all have to and move somewhere else.

I'm not completely without heart, I have some sympathy for farmers and others that actually work on the land as they absolutely have to be there but from what I can see they make up a fairly small percentage of the people that now live in rural locations (it also doesn't help that farmers are getting screwed by the supermarkets as well). For the most part our rural community subsidies seem to be going into the hands of people that live there by choice and I can't help feeling that they should really be paying what it actually costs.