The question of whether a Labour Government would introduce road pricing – some sort of pay-per-mile arrangement – was something of a hot potato in the run up to the election. The Conservatives said that Labour would introduce it and Labour said that it didn’t have plans to do so.
Then, a week into the new Government’s term, a senior civil servant from the Department for Transport put the cat among the pigeons with a post on X which urged his new masters to bring road pricing into play sooner rather than later. Michael Dnes, a senior official in the Department for Transport (DfT) and head of future roads technology, made some pretty interesting arguments.
The problem facing any Government transitioning from diesel and petrol vehicles to electric ones is that they will gradually lose the income from duty on fuel. This will be even more pressing for the Labour Government if it reverses the Conservative’s decision to push back the phase-out date for new petrol or diesel cars to be sold in the UK from 2030 to 2035.
Dnes’ proposition – which you can no longer read on X since he was asked to delete his posts – is that only new vehicles should be subject to the pay-per-mile tax. That would mean that all existing owners of EVs at the date when the tax was introduced would be exempt and, he pointed out, an added bonus would be that the resale value of their EVs would be boosted.
Dnes thinks that this way of introducing charges will reduce public backlash. He also points out that this solution will require no retrofitting of technology to existing vehicles. Additionally, he floated the idea of a charging model that would help reduce congestion, with costs for busy roads being higher than those for quiet ones.
To date, the public hasn’t been hugely supportive of a switch to pay-per-mile taxes, although many are undecided. A survey of 2,000 UK adults by Go Compare in February this year found that 26% of them supported a move to pay-per-mile, 53% opposed it and 20% weren’t sure. There are also issues of fairness to deal with such as whether vulnerable people or those that depend on their vehicles for their income should be charged differently.
Dnes said in his posts that the Government should act now. His thinking is that the UK – like France and Germany – only have a few EVs on the road right now, so exempting them would not be seen as unfair by other motorists and would not lead to much revenue loss. And it would mean that early adopters of EVs didn’t feel hard done by. The new system should come in before 2029, he reckons, or it will be too late because there will be too many EVS on the road and political unrest will ensue.
The other danger is that, without some form of tax for EVs being phased in, driving will become cheaper per mile than alternative modes of transport. That could mean that our roads will become even more congested than ever, with the associated wear and damage that comes with higher vehicle loads.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thermal Road Repairs: Decarbonising the asphalt repair industry
High output. Low emission. Zero waste. Permanent solution.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sources: