Fuel duty – a tax we should all welcome

I’m not so sure that increases of fuel duty while keeping the car tax is a good idea. There’s a lot to be said for scrapping car and lorry tax and putting up tax on fuel consumed. This way reduced consumption of fuel would be encouraged and heavy users penalised. It would encourage car owners to buy smaller and more efficient cars and would effectively tax all those lorries coming from the continent. The tax would have to be balanced to a median so as to avoid undue cost to our own food lorries and commercial vehicles.

You cant tell me that we still after 100 years can not come up with something better than the combustion engine! The governments of the globe should be saying to car manufacturers that the engines they have been storing for the last 20 years because the big oil companies have bought their silence should now be forced to release the designs for manufacture for the greater good. Do the government and car manufacturers think the public are stupid? If we all really though about how advance and easier our lives have become over the last twenty years through leaps in technology we would actually start to question why are we still using the combustion engine now matter how efficient we are told it is these days it really has had its day. It’s time to stop pretending to us all that there is no better plan and come clean.

This one is tricky for me. We are in a rural area in Devon, I love driving, and we need a largish vehicle to negotiate the unmade track. (So a diesel 4×4 at present – Honda therefore reliable.) Skipping one or two long journey per year would soonpay for all the other costs. I’ve not worked out the practicalities and maths – but rural and other factors being allowed for would seem fair, but I can opt to pay for my form of leisure of it involves driving.

Changing for a slightly more economical 4×4 is absolute madness. To get a similar vehicle will cost you at least £15000 on top for very little improvement in fuel consumption. Frankly, I am not a believer in ‘global warming’ but do subscribe to ‘climate change’. This is a natural process and there is nothing we can do about it except accept it and plan accordingly. The ‘doomsters’ will react against this but I have yet to find clear evidence to the contrary. Yes, it is expedient to reduce our ‘carbon footprint’ -tell the Americans and Chinese! I do believe that man’s contribution via cars,transport, aircraft etc. is minimal when one considers methane production by herbivores and the contributions of volcanic activity. Earth is very adaptable and will adapt. One more point, Photosynthesis rate is governed by a numberof factors, in particular carbon dioxide concentrations. Carbon dioxide availability has been the limiting factor to the rate of the process. Green plants will take advantage of the increase in carbon dioxide levels and eventually a balance will be established again, as up to now. KJG

While none of us likes to pay more fuel duty, I think this is probably the most effective way to reduce car usage – with two pre-conditions: that diesel for use in heavy vehicles is exempt, so as not to increase food and other essential commodity prices, and that provision of public transport is greatly increased, as in the OAP bus subsidy which is proving popoular.
On a more general point, I get a little tired of stories about oil companies ‘buying up and hiding’ more effective means of powering cars. I worked for oil companies for most of my working life and, while it would certainly be untrue to say that they are a public-spirited bunch, most deplore the use of petroleum as a vehicle fuel when it should be used more beneficially as a feedstock for plastics, phamaceuticals, dyestuffs and almost endless other goods. Indeed, I remember a management seminar some 30 years ago that deplored the excessive use of private cars, blaming such use not only for the more obvious adverse effects such as damage to health (principally from lead in those days) but for the adverse effects on society, such as the breakup of local communities which has led to more youth delinquency and more crime. However, the popularity of TV programmes such as ‘Top Gear’ indicates how difficult it will be to wean many people away from the car!

Good point on commercial vehicle tax from Pickle, this needs to be considered somehow.

Unfortunately for Myrtle I haven’t found an alternative to the combustion engine and neither has anyone else – there’s no ‘conspiracy’ that I know of. Interestingly if you look at combustion engine efficiency it has improved in leaps and bounds over the last twenty or thirty years.

Speaking very personally I am less concerned about emissions than I am about consumption, by which I mean the consumption of non-renewable resources, in this case oil.

As Terry Lowther rightly points out there are a myriad of uses for oil and simply burning it to get to and from the shops doesn’t seem like the most sensible use.

Therefore anything that makes people think harder about using it (ie tax) has to be a good thing, no?

It’s right that the bulk of tax raised from motorists should be from fuel duty to discourage excessive driving, but in the interest of reducing the total amount of fuel burnt the tax regime should also encourage the use of more efficient engines. This means diesels which are by their nature 10 to 15 percent more economical than petrol engines. Most European countries have realised this and made diesel significantly cheaper at the pump.

Surely fuel must be quite cheap as few motorists drive in an economical manner and they still buy large 4x4s and high performance models. Therefore fuel is still considered cheap. Surely increasing VAT on fuel would hit the private motorists whereas large companies would just claim it back.

I’d favour fuel tax to replace road tax. At a stroke you pay for what you use so the heavier users and light users at last have a fair system. Problem is going to be that instead of any tax increase being calculated so that the average user breaks even, the tax will be such that you end up paying through the nose just like they did with water metering. It will be a back door method of increasing road tax for everyone.