The UK government stands to lose out on billions of dollars in taxes on petrol and diesel by encouraging drivers to adopt electric cars, and instead makes up for the shortfall by taxing road users per mile. The government wants to make up for it, a senior government adviser said.
'Big Brother Is Watching You'-style cameras to track drivers as Britain stands to lose billions of pounds of tax money from the UK due to government policy decisions to encourage electric vehicles (EVs) face a future in which they will be charged road use tolls. Driver for one year.
In the UK, the two main ways in which drivers are taxed are motor vehicle excise duty ('motor tax'), which is paid once a year depending on the type of car, and fuel tax, which is paid at the pump when refueling. However, EVs pay neither of these taxes, and while electricity is not tax-free, some taxes and surcharges are levied on household electricity use, which governments a priori Unable to exercise discretion, they will likely turn to other sources of funding. John Armitt, chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, said:
Speaking at a conference on transport infrastructure on Thursday, Sir John said the government could either fund future roads through general taxation or find a way to tax electric vehicles. state guardian. In particular, he talked about something called road pricing, which is a tax based on the distance a car is driven. In some cases, this already exists, such as toll roads; currently very rare in the UK — or use London's congestion charge.
A simple approach is to use the car's annual mileage, already recorded during the government-mandated annual roadworthiness test (MOT), to find out how much the car has driven in a given 12-month period. , and issue an invoice based on it. However, as Sir John has expressed, the Government may want a more intrusive system. He said, “People probably won't like this because it's 'Big Brother watching you.'” [but] You can pay different tolls anywhere in the country, depending on the time of day and the type of road you're driving, and just pick up your bill. ”
Regarding the government's efforts to recover the funds lost in promoting electricity projects, he said: But many would say road pricing is inevitable. Personally, I don't see why it should be any different than anything else…we pay for all other infrastructure services as we use them, and also for road driving through gas taxes. I'll pay. If you're going to lose your gas tax, [more than] £30 billion a year, what is the government going to replace it with? ”
guardian He points out that the government believes almost 100 per cent of cars on Britain's roads will be electric by 2045, assuming a ban on new internal combustion engine cars goes ahead in 2035. Of course, it would be easy for the government to announce such grand plans far in the future, when most of the people involved would have retired by the time the difficult decisions are made. This is by no means certain. As it stands, such decisions have been reversed several times. european countries including the UK The harsh reality is already upon us, and it may be again in a few years.
