Should Drivers Pay Road Tax?

I think you've rather missed the point that the whole challenge arises from a transition to electric vehicles, where fuel, as such, goes away, and with it the whole basis of our existing tax system. Adding a few pence to the tax on fuel won't have much effect if no-one's using any to start with.

Wouldn't it make more sense to use parking charges to subsidise public transport to make it affordable for every one?

Communism!

Next you will be calling for an effective social security safety net that prevents people from going hungry or cold...

But we can't have that!  It'll be exploited by freeloaders!  It'll deny people the incentive for them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps!

Always interested me how the different ideologies differentiate themselves on this one.  Times past one faction tended to ignore the problems with the wealthy (actually most governments do - there's almost never a bad time to be wealthy) while another tended to ignore issues of "fairness" amongst the poor.

I was a bit shocked when Lord Bird came out as a conservative but I do think there's something to the Big Issue's "A hand up not a handout".

I'm not saying the proceeds should be used specifically to pay for the roads. I'm looking at it from a 'what should we tax to discourage an anti-social behaviour [private vehicle use]?' / 'how can we fill a hole in the public finances left by declining fuel/vehicle duty?' perspective.

I'm not a big fan of hypothecation in this instance, and would rather see the roads (and public transport) continue to be paid for out of general taxation, so that the budget can be based on what's needed*, rather than what we happen to be able to raise through vehicle-related taxation.

[We're talking ideal world, here - I wouldn't suggest that what's currently spent on public transport bears much relation to what's needed.]

I did. But I forgot to tell Auntie!

I caught part of that prog, "Sliced Bread". They were comparing EV vs ICE on CO2 and running cost per mile.

On the latter point, they came up with EV@7p/mile, ICE@17.5p/mile based on the stunning assumption that the government would not shift the tax burden from the sinking platform to the one floating!

No surprise, I've seen estimates of 10p/mile as the figure they would have to tax EVs to keep the revenue the same.

In other words, the much vaunted running cost advantage of EVs is built on shifting sands, and will vanish as soon as the government feels the market is committed to EVs.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/electric-cars-road-...

Was a rubbish test (laughably called the first ever real world comparable test). Let's check the battery level by peering at some leds and hope I get the reading right.

How was 13 miles, 10 laps round a track a valid journey. Howabout a 50 or 100 mile trip. Did he even go at the same speeds ?

As to the bloke who seemed to be doing 2000 miles a year (35000 in 14 years). The answer is to give up your car as you clearly don't need it.

hawkinspeter wrote:

I'm not a fan of "road tax" as it just feeds the stupid with ideas that they have more rights on the roads.

However, if we're going to need a replacement for VED (which would be great as I'm fed up with all the fumes put out by entitled car drivers) then it should be charged proportionate to axle weight (possibly even to the 4th power of axle weight) and possibly described as a road repair tax.

I have similar feelings about 'road tax', it was stopped in 1937 for very good reasons. If we pursue this idea we could end up with things like 'school tax', from which childless adults are exempt, and so on. Having said that, I'd vote for a separate Warmongering/Armaments/Armed Forces Tax which pacifists will not be required to pay.

Although axle weight would be a good principle, it does allow some to bleat how their claimed need for a big vehicle is unfairly penalised. And don't forget that VED evasion has got worse since tax discs were abolished.

Reversing Rishi Sunak's latest stunt and raising the duty on fossil fuel would be an up-front, honest way of dealing with some of the problems. That way we tax the usage (consumption), rather than vehicle ownership. It may even allow us to seriously discuss important issues such as road danger, pollution - NOx, CO, particulates, noise etc - and the other serious issues created by current traffic levels. However, it doesn't address the issue of EVs which, as most now acknowledge, exist to save the car industry, not the planet.

How about a separate annual tax for anyone with a current driving license that has at least 6 points? There would be a higher tax band for the bastards with 12 points or more, since it seems that many (all?) of them plead "exceptional hardship" and get treated almost like victims by magistrates when they should be pariahs and get ASBOs like yobs. It could be paid by Direct Debit like Council Tax, which should mean less admin cost involved in collecting it.

They will not reinstate the 5p drop just before a potential election.

Rishi might not last a week, let alone the next year. Some one is gunning for him. The unkempt slob denies it's anyone at No 10, but seeing that he seemed completely oblivious to some raucous parties going on In there, some of which he was at, I'm not convinced by his pleading...

ktache wrote:

They will not reinstate the 5p drop just before a potential election.

Rishi might not last a week, let alone the next year. Some one is gunning for him. The unkempt slob denies it's anyone at No 10, but seeing that he seemed completely oblivious to some raucous parties going on In there, some of which he was at, I'm not convinced by his pleading...

What's Rishi's next step? Reducing alcohol duty on vintage champagne?

Hmmm - a tax based on licence points would seem to be de-criminalising it, whereas we need to emphasise that points are the result of criminal and dangerous behaviour. Also, any law that results in a financial penalty is merely a law for the poor and can be ignored by the wealthy.

Sooner or later I guess they will tax electricity delivered to EVs.

Sriracha wrote:

Sooner or later I guess they will tax electricity delivered to EVs.

Well, they already do, but presumably you mean an extra tax for EVs.

I don't think differentiating between the end uses of electricity is that useful (although I'd welcome extra taxes on shops with open-front fridges) and it might end up with people fitting solar power and off-setting against their car rather than their heating bills - there's too many loopholes.

The major problems with EVs are their weight, use of rare metals and road congestion, so I think extra taxes should be targetting those issues.

Actually, taking 20%VAT on goods and services as an almost universal baseline, we get a tax rebate on all electrical consumption now.

With most EVs charged through some kind of domestic wallbox (even if the electrons originate in your own solar panels) or public charger, all with Internet smarts, I don't think taxing EV kWh's is going to be a challenge. Of course some enterprising crims will be rigging up homebrew workarounds, just as they do with red diesel etc, but overall I'd expect it to be a pretty simple and expeditious way of replacing RFL.

The workaround is a standard plug.

It's not going to take a criminal mastermind to evade that tax.

IMHO the government will want to use EV charging and EV batteries for grid balancing so will want to incentivise the use of proper charging boxes.

A tax on using those boxes will achieve the opposite.

You might be right about the plug. But nobody I know with an EV uses a plug, because it is so slow. Pretty sure that with smart meters they will be able to recognise the usage signature of an EV on charge so all it needs is some work at the billing end to add the appropriate tax.

I'm not an electrician but I'm not sure there'll be an easily discernible difference between charging an EV and charging a home storage battery or even running an oven.

A standard plug will deliver 3KwH so overnight could put about 50% into a standard 70KwH EV battery. Unless you're doing 100+ miles a day that would be sufficient.

Even if you were doing more than that if you could get a full charge in on the weekend you could still get by on the standard plug during the week.

Would be a faff but worth it to halve your fuel bill.

They've been looking at pattern recognition to disaggregate electrical device consumption for quite a while, a quick Google will throw up loads of papers, eg
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Electric-vehicle-charging-load-fil...

This one is more aimed at the lay person:
https://blog.sense.com/how-sense-recognizes-the-electric-vehicle-in-your...

Meanwhile, you are correct in assuming HMG wants to know everything about your EV's electricity consumption:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/18/section/15/enacted

Sriracha wrote:

They've been looking at pattern recognition to disaggregate electrical device consumption for quite a while, a quick Google will throw up loads of papers, eg https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Electric-vehicle-charging-load-fil... This one is more aimed at the lay person: https://blog.sense.com/how-sense-recognizes-the-electric-vehicle-in-your... Meanwhile, you are correct in assuming HMG wants to know everything about your EV's electricity consumption: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/18/section/15/enacted

It seems easy enough to defeat detection of EV charging - just put an intermediate device in between the source and the EV. Something like a bunch of capacitors or even a flywheel could be used to flatten the 'ramping up' of charging.

Interesting.

Still not sure it's reliable enough to base taxation on but that could improve.

I'm sure the government will just go down the route of road charging or mileage charging as they are relatively simple to implement.

I think the smart charging points are simply for grid stability purposes and that will trump the desire to tax EV electricity.

Sriracha wrote:

You might be right about the plug. But nobody I know with an EV uses a plug, because it is so slow. Pretty sure that with smart meters they will be able to recognise the usage signature of an EV on charge so all it needs is some work at the billing end to add the appropriate tax.

Where I work (or at least when I go to the office) has been using a plug and extension lead for charging the odd EV. I think they get away with it due to having a private car park and thus a cable trailing across the floor isn't a problem.

Rich_cb wrote:

The workaround is a standard plug. It's not going to take a criminal mastermind to evade that tax. IMHO the government will want to use EV charging and EV batteries for grid balancing so will want to incentivise the use of proper charging boxes. A tax on using those boxes will achieve the opposite.

Also, it's taxing the wrong thing. The problems with EVs aren't that they use electricity so much, but their weight (which is a major factor in their pollution levels), use of materials and contribution to congestion (or non-reduction compared to ICE vehicles).

Mileage or weight would be better choices for taxing. It'd be fun to tax vehicles based on how long they're stuck in traffic queues, but that'd probably lead to drivers becoming even angrier whenever they're delayed.

Definitely needs to be a traffic jam tax 😂😂

Personally I think we'll have widespread driverless taxi services within a decade so charging tax per mile will become far easier.