Can you defend VED?

davis

jonomc4 wrote:

For Tax to work for me has to be representative of use: e.g. the more you earn the more tax you pay.

Taxing of cars through fuel prices is positive taxation as you pay for what you use. Higher the tax the less you will use. The Gov has recently stated that it is going to look at VED because too many people are buying small cars to avoid tax - therefore their "guaranteed" cashflow is drying up. So the Gov is not using VED against pollution but as a way of raising taxes. But VED is a pointless tax - buy a £62,000 car - the VED is about £438 - is this going to stop me buying it? No it doesn't (it didn't even) and so what about the £280 a year in VED - no it doesn't - you look at it as the same way as the £12,400 VAT you pay on the car - just another Gov tax or the £1,200 a year insurance cost.

But what does stop me from using the big car all the time is the fuel prices - the smaller car gets used far more often and the bigger one for the longer weekend drives. Anyway for every mile I do in the car I do two on the bike.

The only argument against this is the many millions of people who have to use a car and are on a low income - think about a disabled person or someone who has to travel 40 miles each way to work and there is no convenient public transport - a higher fuel tax is making some of these people very poor. Unlike PAYE - it is the poor that are being hit by these indirect taxes far more than the rich - maybe it is better to reduce waste in public spending?

I think you and I are similar in our thinking, though I buy much, much older and cheaper cars. I don't see that VED dissuades people from buying big cars, so it's certainly not achieving its supposed purpose.

Stone Glider

IIRC and I probably don't, there was an opportunity, many years ago to dispense with VED. The computer system was due an up-grade/replacement and there was discussion about scrapping the system and closing DVLC in Swansea. However, there are a lot of Labour held constituencies around Swansea and there was a Labour Government, so no change.

FWIW there is a good case to switch it all over to an insurance based scheme; more expensive to insure cars will provide a progressive tax base and the Government can collect a tax on the premium.

jonomc4

airbag wrote:

jonomc4 wrote:

When I come back from the supermarket - I normally have 15+ bags of food - I really don't want to take that on a bus or bike thanks.

If that service matters to you that much, then you shouldn't mind paying a modest fee for it. Although hopefully, with more people taking stuff by bus, the buses would be better equipped to handle it, with more storage space. I can't say that tesco losing a few customers will stop me from sleeping at night either, nor do I think it would make the economy collapse.

It is not a luxury - my family and I need to buy the food to live - of maybe I should make more journeys on a bus to carry the bags - way to cut congestion! And sadly I don't have a bus that goes up a road - let alone stop outside my front door.

You missing the point - you are expecting the supermarket to forgo profits for your aim, remember they own the land that the cars park on - it is up to them to choose the charge.

With your line of thinking - what the gov should do is charge you to park your car on your driveway - land you own and paid for just the same as the supermarkets. Next up we will all be carrying a methane meter so they can bill us for each fart.

shouldbeinbed

jonomc4 wrote:

airbag wrote:

jonomc4 wrote:

When I come back from the supermarket - I normally have 15+ bags of food - I really don't want to take that on a bus or bike thanks.

If that service matters to you that much, then you shouldn't mind paying a modest fee for it. Although hopefully, with more people taking stuff by bus, the buses would be better equipped to handle it, with more storage space. I can't say that tesco losing a few customers will stop me from sleeping at night either, nor do I think it would make the economy collapse.

It is not a luxury - my family and I need to buy the food to live - of maybe I should make more journeys on a bus to carry the bags - way to cut congestion! And sadly I don't have a bus that goes up a road - let alone stop outside my front door.

You missing the point - you are expecting the supermarket to forgo profits for your aim, remember they own the land that the cars park on - it is up to them to choose the charge.

With your line of thinking - what the gov should do is charge you to park your car on your driveway - land you own and paid for just the same as the supermarkets. <snip>

+ 1 I can fill a large car boot with shopping; and am paying a fuel premium for the logistics of getting it there already at the till; I have to shop for a large family & take the in-laws too. Imagine a 50 person bus, likely 25-30 families many with the 15 odd bags jonomc & I manage. How big a bus are you planning? Also unless the bus is doing a door to door service, that many bags aren't feasible to carry in one go for any distance. This is very much a people's front of Judea conversation, you would need to tear down an awful lot of societal infrastructure and it simply isn't going to happen. VED or tax on fuel : meh, either or.
Better to enforce good driving standards and courtesy. Reduce the (erroneous) perception of danger posed to cyclists so we can all get about as we wish & shorter trips / commutes etc become attractive options to ride rather than drive with the benefits that brings all round.

airbag

It is a luxury - you wouldn't starve to death if you couldn't drive to the supermarket every week and pick up a car's worth of stuff. If you're buying lots, then most of it will be predictable stuff - which means it can be delivered by van. If a few people on your road can't/won't drive to the supermarket, a bus service would become economic, as would a more local store within walking/cycling distance. Besides, if you're carrying that much, you must be buying big and infrequent - which means the parking charge wouldn't have much effect on you - you'd probably benefit if VED was abolished at the same time.

jonomc4

goody goody - you assume I live down a road with a lot of houses? The van you propose is still on the roads doing all the miles (though with less fuel efficiency). Maybe just maybe I don't want to shop online - I want to check the sell by date myself thanks.

And as usual you have, with the politicians skill, forgotten to answer the main point of my post - why should supermarkets loose business to charge people to park on the land they own? Really a p1ss poor response and nothing more than I would expect - really you have all the ability to be a politician - off to Westminster with you.

bails87

jonomc4 wrote:

goody goody - you assume I live down a road with a lot of houses? The van you propose is still on the roads doing all the miles (though with less fuel efficiency). .

Not sure how valid that point is.

A van leaves a supermarket and does 10, 20, 30(?) drops, doing one long trip to save 10/20/30 shorter ones. It doesn't just do a return trip between the supermarket and your house.

nation

bails87 wrote:

jonomc4 wrote:

goody goody - you assume I live down a road with a lot of houses? The van you propose is still on the roads doing all the miles (though with less fuel efficiency). .

Not sure how valid that point is.

A van leaves a supermarket and does 10, 20, 30(?) drops, doing one long trip to save 10/20/30 shorter ones. It doesn't just do a return trip between the supermarket and your house.

When I worked for Tesco.com, the van routes would generally work out to about twenty-thirty minutes per delivery, with ten of that being the actual unloading of the van itself. That was for a supermarket on the edge of a fairly expansive rural area - the limit for deliveries was something like forty-ish miles away (not that all deliveries would be that distant, but that was the sort of area we were covering). I'm not sure what the upper limit of deliveries on the van's capacity was, to be honest, because for the area journey time used to be the limiting factor (there were only so many stops that the van could do before it was meant to be back to pick up orders being picked while it was on its run). With the vans we had, you could probably fit around fifty people's shopping in them.

This was years ago, when it was quite a new thing, though. I've noticed that the vans they use now are smaller, so I wonder if it's still the case that time is the limiting factor, not capacity.

I started online shopping when we moved down south and got rid of the car for a couple of years, we've since got a car again but still shop online. Asda do quite a handy thing which is flag items with a shorter than expected expiry date on them on the deliver slip, so you can reject them at the door if they're no use to you.

airbag

jonomc4 wrote:

And as usual you have, with the politicians skill, forgotten to answer the main point of my post - why should supermarkets loose business to charge people to park on the land they own? Really a p1ss poor response and nothing more than I would expect - really you have all the ability to be a politician - off to Westminster with you.

The answer to your main point - supermarkets and out-of-town retail parks in general should lose business because they do the most to encourage superfluous car use - and drive out local businesses to boot. If that means economic upheaval (as somebody else said), well, feh - that's the luxury of commenting on the internet, I only wish to speculate as to what an ideal tax structure would be, not the practicalities of getting there.

EKE_38BPM

Stone Glider wrote:

...there is a good case to switch it all over to an insurance based scheme; more expensive to insure cars will provide a progressive tax base and the Government can collect a tax on the premium.

If there was a switch to an insurance based scheme, the young will get stung hard as will people in more deprived areas. My neice lives in one of the areas with the highest insurance rates in the country and, as an eighteen year old, isn't earning much. Her insurance for something like an old Ford Ka is in the £2000 area. I've also heard of an eighteen year old who was quoted almost £3000 to be a named driver on his mum's old Focus.

So those of us who pay low insurance, in my case just over £200, may like a shift to an insurance based scheme, but for many it won't work out well at all.

I've got a friend who drives a Merc and two modified Nissan 200SXs, but because he is on some sort of motortrade insurance, he only pays around £400 fully comp on his cars and he's also insured to drive any car. VED on those three cars will be more than any taxation on the insurance he pays.

daviesee

daviesee wrote:

Looking like a nicely warmed up debate :twisted:

Unfortunately, I am finishing work so will have better things to do........

Carry on chaps!

Well done!

jonomc4 wrote:

Next up we will all be carrying a methane meter so they can bill us for each fart.

Shhhhhh. They may hear your idea

rolf_f

jonomc4 wrote:

goody goody - you assume I live down a road with a lot of houses? The van you propose is still on the roads doing all the miles (though with less fuel efficiency). Maybe just maybe I don't want to shop online - I want to check the sell by date myself thanks.

To be fair, unless you qualify your comment with the observation that you don't live on a road with lots of houses, it is reasonable to assume you do. Most people do.

As for 'what you want' - if the discussion is based on want rather than need there is little argument against you paying more for that privilege.The van will struggle to be as inefficient as your car assuming that there is some planning in the delivery routes.

Initialised

Fuel tax is by far the fairest way of taxing the motorist. Scrap all the rest and put it all on fuel.

Stone Glider

Many European countries have an insurance linked system of registration, if this was adopted with increased fuel duties some sort of simplified, progressive system could evolve without a need for all those people in Swansea.

As far as the shopping argument goes, what is wrong with ordering the non-perishables / frozen stuff to be delivered monthly and do a weekly shop plus daily for bread, etc.?

BTW I understand that the gross mileage covered in this country has declined for the past three years at least. A country with a receding economy does have an up-side after all

EKE_38BPM

Initialised wrote:

Fuel tax is by far the fairest way of taxing the motorist. Scrap all the rest and put it all on fuel.

Won't someone think of the bumpkins!

greg66_tri_v2.0

I have to admit that rising fuel prices are proving a little tiresome at the moment.

They seem to have risen to a level at which they are not putting people off driving in noticeable numbers, which is bad; but they are encouraging people to drive slowly in the belief that that will aid their fuel consumption, which is also bad.

The net result is that the roads are still full, but they are now full of tediously slow moving traffic.

In my view, we need a nice sharp severe upward hike in fuel costs. That should thin out the road population nicely. Those who survive the hike will not care a whit about fuel consumption, and speeds will increase. Everyone's a winner!

Toot toot!! :twisted:

sfichele

estampida wrote:

ved needs to stay and for good reason
....vehicle ... weight...

The damage caused to the roads is proportional to axle weight to the power of 4. That is a vehicle that is twice as heavy does 8 times more damage to the road.

A Ford focus weighs around 1.3 tons, whereas a 4x4 Volvo XC90, Chelsea tractor, weighs around 2.1 tons and will cause around 7 times more damage to the road surface. If people want to buy horrid oversized status cars like a BMW X5 etc, they should pay more car tax for that reason alone imo.

davis

sfichele wrote:

A Ford focus weighs around 1.3 tons, whereas a 4x4 Volvo XC90, Chelsea tractor, weighs around 2.1 tons and will cause around 7 times more damage to the road surface. If people want to buy horrid oversized status cars like a BMW X5 etc, they should pay more car tax for that reason alone imo.

I use my truck about 5% of the amount I use my Focus. Should the truck cost twice as much tax? Surely it's better to have the tax I pay based on a factor of the road damage (weight, and therefore economy) and use? Like, say... only having fuel tax?
Obviously this will change e.g. hauliers' businesses (and many others), but it would reflect the impact the vehicle's having on the road network.

asquithea

But isn't this talk of the "impact on the road" an example of the same flawed thinking that some motorists engage in around cyclists and "road tax"?

We all understand that roads are paid for out of general taxation, and we spend a lot of time lobbying for smoother surfaces and better junctions. Shouldn't we be paying more - perhaps a tax based on consumption of cake?

davis

asquithea wrote:

But isn't this talk of the "impact on the road" an example of the same flawed thinking that some motorists engage in around cyclists and "road tax"?

I think it's very close -- the thing that bugs me about VED is it's ostensibly a tax on the more polluting cars because it's based on the exhaust emissions, but it's a completely flawed method because it doesn't take account of the amount of use. If you're going to tax pollution, then tax it; surely taxing the potential to pollute is slightly daft?

You're right about it being very close to the "road tax" I'm not so sure that taxing based on the "impact on the road" is actually that bad an idea -- I'm guessing that the impact of bikes on the road is so negligible as to be not worth accounting for... Christ this feels like a can of worms.

DonDaddyD

I think you all need to consider what G66 and CIB have said.

CIB's point; VED is an income generator for the Government, a significant one. If you shift the income generated from that to fuel tax then you risk pricing the majority of people out of being able to afford it. There are knock on effects as well delivery costs, buses, transport all become more expensive because fuel is too integral to the way society works.. It extends beyond the 'petrol pump' and so its naive to simply talk about a price hike and think it will only impact one aspect of society - drivers/pollution.


That said if petrol became £3ltr (and it would probably have to be a lot more to cover the income generated by VED) becomes a rich mans commodity- which was Greg's point. He'll still be able to drive his Porsche for fun but I won't be able to drive my son to his Grandparents, for example. So who really benefits?

daviesee

DonDaddyD wrote:

That said if petrol became £3ltr (and it would probably have to be a lot more to cover the income generated by VED) becomes a rich mans commodity- which was Greg's point. He'll still be able to drive his Porsche for fun but I won't be able to drive my son to his Grandparents, for example. So who really benefits?

Greg?

rick_chasey

I thought the gov't wants to encourage less pollutant/road damaging travel, rather than discouraging travel generally?

They want people to drive around - it's good for business, and people being mobile over reasonable distances makes them more economically productive.

They just don't want people doing it in an unnecessarily consumptive way.

And if they don't, they should.

mudcow007

EKE_38BPM wrote:

If there was a switch to an insurance based scheme, the young will get stung hard as will people in more deprived areas. My neice lives in one of the areas with the highest insurance rates in the country and, as an eighteen year old, isn't earning much. Her insurance for something like an old Ford Ka is in the £2000 area. I've also heard of an eighteen year old who was quoted almost £3000 to be a named driver on his mum's old Focus.

young lad by mine (he is 18) is paying £2500 on a Fiesta as a named driver. they wouldn't insure him on his own

if the gov wants to tax out more polluting vehicles, why is the road fund of a motorbike only £15

have you seen some of the crap that comes out of a 2 stroke wasp in a can?!

MonkeyMonster

so isn't the problem due to the worst offenders having more then enough money that they wont really ever be put off driving ridiculous cars even if petrol was super expensive? All that would do is affect the majority of more normal users and not the rich hoi paloi who have the heavy gas guzzlers...
Given the recent tax avoidance "scams" being highlighted of late the gov might start to get some more money back in its coffers.

phy2sll2

DonDaddyD wrote:

That said if petrol became £3ltr (and it would probably have to be a lot more to cover the income generated by VED) becomes a rich mans commodity- which was Greg's point. He'll still be able to drive his Porsche for fun but I won't be able to drive my son to his Grandparents, for example. So who really benefits?

Like I said, don't reckon it'd be anywhere near that much.

Me wrote:

£5.8 Bn / 69.4 Bn litres = 8.4p a litre.

bails87

DonDaddyD wrote:

CIB's point; VED is an income generator for the Government, a significant one. If you shift the income generated from that to fuel tax then you risk pricing the majority of people out of being able to afford it.


That said if petrol became £3ltr (and it would probably have to be a lot more to cover the income generated by VED)

Some estimates for the average driver/car:
6000 miles per year (very conservative)
40mpg
petrol costs £1.40/litre (£6.35 per gallon = 15.89p per mile)
[The average mileage is higher than what I've used, and the average petrol price is 130.9p/litre for supermarket fuel, but I'm playing it safe and going high on purpose and to make the maths easier ]

At present they'll be spending ~£953 per year on 150 gallons of fuel. Say they're spending £150/year on VED. Add the £150 onto the fuel and thats £1 per gallon, or 22p pence per litre. So no VED, but petrol goes up to £1.62 per litre.

Of course you have to take account of the fact that fuel use may drop as the price goes up, but it's already shown itself to be pretty inelastic.

Unless fuel use absolutely plummeted (unlikely), it wouldn't have to go up to £3/litre, or anywhere near it.

SimonAH

Are we not confusing two issues? Raising revenue is an entirely separate issue to green pressure (although of course taxes are almost always linked to something inarguable to make them easier to impose).

If you want green pressure then simply legislate. No new private vehicle can be sold in the UK that does less than 50mpg combined? Tighten up emissions checks at MOT time? - those are both off the cuff and not thought out in any detail by the way.

If you want to generate income then generate income by taxation, just be honest about how you are doing it.

Personally I'd like to see the enormous, convoluted and stupidly complex tax system collapsed entirely and a simple system based on income and asset growth introduced. Make it very very simple and it becomes very very hard to avoid. It also would totally slash the overhead required to collect it.

Don't give me this b*llocks that taxes are used as a social force for good though - that's just how they are marketed.

jonomc4

Do you know what - I don't like the idea that a car must do 50 mpg combined.

None of my cars do that! I have two big luxury cars - as explained at the start I am already paying a lot of extra tax (VAT) to buy them - extra insurance and more tax per mile on fuel because of their larger engine size - I have accepted that and I pay the cost to have that - but I feel I should have the right to choose. I am not even sure if my 25mpg combined two ton cars even have an effect on climate change - I have yet to see definitive proof one way or the other (but please please please let's not get into that argument).

But when all said and done I also make the choice to do twice as many miles (maybe more) by bike than car. But it is my choice once again - but what is the government decided I could only ride a moutain bike! I do believe in the right to free choice as long as it is reasonable - and I don't think 25mpg combined is unreasonable. When there is a viable and convenient alternative such as hydrogen fuel cells I will jump at it. That said - if I did a lot of miles every year, then I would buy a very fuel efficient car - but the few miles I do - I like to do in comfort.

bails87

jonomc4 wrote:

I don't think 25mpg combined is unreasonable.
the few miles I do - I like to do in comfort.

Really? Cars that do near 50mpg are uncomfortable?

It's not a choice between a Bentley or a moped, with nothing in between.

A 3 litre diesel Audi A6 will do over 53mpg (claimed, anyway, and that's what matters). I'd hardly consider that uncomfortable.

Edit: Not that I agree with the ban on anything under 50mpg, but I don't think the poster who suggested it does either, it was just an example of what could be done.