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June 10, 2005
Pay as you drive scheme
New Labour all over again. Darling’s ‘Pay as you drive’ scheme is the companion policy to ID cards.
The public is asked to pay for new (GPS) technology, which may or may not be administered properly, which provides information to the government which is not accessible to the public. Another form of surveillance.
Transport problems in Britain are economic and environmental. Solutions have to be found that increase efficiency and use cleaner energy, in other words we need to improve public transport and change over to using vehicles that run on different fuels.
Darling’s proposal is on the face of it a step backwards. The present reliance on fuel tax does at least mean that people with fuel inefficient vehicles pay more than those who have ‘greener’ cars. At present the disparity between the best and worst performers is about five to one. Any transport policy that fails to recognize this must surely be wrong.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4075490.stm
news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=636152005
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4077760.stm
Posted by Simon Holledge at June 10, 2005 11:21 AM
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Comments
I am completely dumbfounded by this policy. Darling says charging different prices to account for varying vehicle fuel efficiencies is "too complicated". It doesn't appear to occur to him that this might be reason enough to think it's a bad idea. This, after Blair said climate change was the biggest problem facing the world today (I'm paraphrasing here). What are they thinking?
Posted by: Garry at June 11, 2005 09:45 PM
Maybe they still think that the environment is the responsibility of another department? It's difficult to understand how they can think that congestion is the only issue here.
Posted by: Simon Holledge at June 12, 2005 12:20 AM