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by gambiting
2955 days ago
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>>and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; If you mean VED I don't think that achieves anything, perhaps only discouraging people from buying cars with particularly high CO2 emissions, but if you can afford a sports car with 200g/km+ emissions, you can probably afford the annual VED on it. Besides, with VED refresh recently it almost doesn't matter, you only discourage people from buying expensive vehicles as they incur extra tax due to their purchase price, not their emissions. >>perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom, and obviously it's not illegal to use your car abroad. Taxing fuel has the nice property of the taxes going into the budget of the country where you buy it, so the assumption is that visitors to the UK will buy fuel here and contribute at least a bit to the UK road budget - and the same goes for British drivers going abroad. |
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Why? The law could just charge based on miles regardless.
However if you did choose to allow people to exempt overseas mileage you could read the odometers at ports (say charge them £10 for the privilege, so it only makes sense if you're doing a lot of mileage)
Clearly Northern Ireland would have to be exempt.
However mileage is very different, the externalities of a smart car driving 50miles from Lancaster to Carlise at 3AM is far different to that of a 13 ton lorry driving from Luton to Oxford Circus at 8AM -- in pollution generated (locally and globally), in damage to the road, congestion