Feb 20 2007
JUST TAXING MOTORISTS MORE IS NOT THE ANSWER
Labour’s road pricing proposal has been shot down in flames on the Downing Street website because it is same old Labour, same old extra tax.
People know they are already paying too much motoring tax, without being told the answer to congestion is to charge them some more.
The main objection is the fact that road charging is on top of everything else. People also dislike the lack of any improvements in the roads and transport system for all the money they are contributing. Some object to more spies in the sky - and on the street corners - with all the extra cameras road pricing will bring. Under Ken Livingstone only the rich can go by car.
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John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Personally, before I would find road charging even slightly acceptable I’d want the following commitments from the government.
1) overall taxation of the motorist will remain the same
2) The costs of the plan will not be funded by the plan.
3) the data of who travelled where and when would be discarded after the billing/query cycle was compleat. Say 2 months ?
4) The police could only query this data after obtaining a court order with the same level proof required as is the case for a search warrent now.
5) the warrent would have to be against a particular person. Not for a list of all cars passing a particular point at a particular time.
6) Any data taken from the system that didn’t meet the cirteria in 5) could not be used as evedance. So if they have a life or death reason for getting the data (terrorism, kidnap etc), then they a have to weigh that against getting a conviction.
Just my take on the subject
Couldn’t we call our Vehicle Excise Duty - Road User Duty, divide the current VED by 365 then charge a daily rate to anyone without the Road User Duty Disk which could be purchased in the same way that we currently pay our VED.
A good example of how this could be utilised is the current congestion charging scheme in London, we have to pay an annual registration fee per vehicle and then a charge per entry.
Foreign users without a RUDD would purchase their disk on arrival for the number of days required and have this checked on the return journey. Any excess duty being paid on exit, it would certainly save tolling all of our slip roads and the problems with payment that this would cause.