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Positively Spuddy in its ignorance

In September, AAT published a short report highlighting £27bn of annual savings that could be made without raising taxes or increasing borrowing – by scrapping car tax and fuel duty and replacing it with a pay-as-you-drive system, by simplifying inheritance tax, and removing higher rate tax relief for pension contributions,

Collecting more in tax is not raising tax in what manner?

8 thoughts on “Positively Spuddy in its ignorance”

  1. Fuel duty *IS* a pay-as-you-drive system.

    Lol yes, but it doesn’t have the extra essential attribute of the State tracking your every move, and also perhaps simply forbidding you from driving by immobilising your engine.

    This is the Guardian; always consider the totalitarian angle in anything they or their readers advocate.

  2. “Fuel duty *IS* a pay-as-you-drive system.”

    And it’s even weighted by (some proxy for) your carbon emissions.

    I imagine if we ever did switch to pay as you drive, it wouldn’t be long before a blisteringly complicated formula was installed that made each mile more expensive in relation to your vehicle’s fuel economy and estimates of how much fuel it would have burned at the speed you’ve been detected travelling at…

    Also I’m perplexed how pay as you drive would be less expensive to administer than the current system? I haven’t read the report but if it “saves money” overall then either it has less admin than car tax and fuel duty (both of which sound pretty simple to implement to me) or it is really just a hidden tax hike, surely?

    Also wonder how this works with foreign lorries / cars driving in the UK, or whether the idea is that you save money by stopping eg British lorry drivers saving tax by driving on UK motorways but using French fuel from when they were last across the Channel. At this point I should probably stop hypothesising and read the actual paper 🙂

  3. This is another reason the Guardian et al are so hot for electric cars. When they’ve forced some of us into these (intentionally the lack of home charging facilities will preclude a large number of the proles ever owning one, and thus driving) all the fuel duty revenue will be lost. Hence the pay as you drive tax. We *need* it you see. The fact they can track us all everywhere is a very fortunate side effect to them.

  4. ‘England and America are two countries separated by a common language.’ – George Bernard Shaw

    Apparently, ‘savings’ has a different meaning in English English.

  5. Gamecock:

    I suspect when ol’ Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, he (and King George) thought England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and N. Ireland would become five of the United States and get their own stars. (It wasn’t so much later ’til that French guy said–in his book–that, in 50 years, the U.S. would be the greatest, most powerful nation on Earth). For all their seafaring prominence, the English missed opportunity
    right there.

  6. “Also I’m perplexed how pay as you drive would be less expensive to administer than the current system? ”

    My thoughts precisely. Vastly more complex than taxing fuel at source. Also annual VED process requires vehicles to be insured and MoT-ed. Given that there is absolutely no way that any government would roll back those annual checks, there will be no cost saving at DVLA either.

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