Pay-Per-Mile Road Pricing is “Inevitable”, Drivers Warned
Motorists will “inevitably” end up paying per mile to drive on Britain’s roads as the switch to electric cars reduces fuel taxes, the Government’s infrastructure tsar has said. The Telegraph has more.
Sir John Armitt, the Chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), said the Government had to consider new ways of funding Britain’s critical infrastructure such as motorways, as the Treasury faces the loss of nearly £30bn in fuel duty receipts.
Different versions of a pay-per-mile system could be considered such as schemes that charge more at busier times, he said, or a privately-financed toll motorway model similar to the one used in France.
Sir John added: “Politically, it’s a very difficult issue. Many people will say road pricing is inevitable.
“Personally, I don’t see why it should be any different to anything else. We pay for all our other infrastructure services as we use them.
“At the extreme… you could pay a different rate, per time of day, per type of road you were driving on, anywhere in the country and you just get a bill because it would all be monitored remotely.
“At the end of the day, it’s the public who pay. We pay either through our taxation, or we pay at the point of use or our pensions are used to invest.”
Fuel duty brings in £25bn for the Treasury per year – equivalent to almost half of Britain’s defence budget. But consultants at PwC have warned the Government stands to lose £9bn of this by 2030, when one in four vehicles on the road is expected to be electric.
A pay-per-mile road tax is one of the potential solutions officials have previously suggested to replace the loss of receipts. The idea has been backed by think tanks and environment groups, who argued that a flat per-mile charge could be easily metered through annual MOT checks or digitally using electric car hardware or fitted black boxes.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Is a significant switch to electric cars actually likely/possible?
In short, nope. Anyone who wanted one has one, 95% are corporate hire, and residuals have collapsed as cars are returned from lease. New sales have bombed…
per mile charging is something we should push back on as much as we can – it’s a MASSIVE vote loser for politicians I’d say, up there with poll tax etc
There is also the issue of measurement and collection. We know before it starts they will monitor every journey we make, ban sone, add excess taxes to others they think we should not make and use the information to our disadvantage.
In short, they will spy on us.
Yes …. and in due course, they will decide whether your journey “is necessary and therefore approved” or not.
The Government and technology = failure. See: NHS computerisation; CoVid Track & Trace; Post Office Horizon.
GPS tracking is easy, and measuring the distance between start and end points – even including way-points – is easy but tracking the road miles covered (road miles not being straight lines) would require something in-vehicle like tachographs in lorries.
And that will spawn an industry of tampering.
I would suspect they’ll do something with mileage at MOT time…
average it out and adjust your dd respectively going forward for next year… still messy
And anyway £9b is chump change – they’ve just splashed £22bn on pointless carbon capture, let alone the huge pay rises for doctors etc, how can this £9b be such a big problem when those billions clearly weren’t?
Don’t forget the third to half a £trillion spent on lockdowns that all parties agreed to, including our treacherous unions. That dwarfs this £22bn and the £21bn ‘black hole’ that Labour are hyperventilating about.
Amazing how those responsible have forgotten it.
That said, printing that half trillion was authorised by Thr RPTB ie mainly banking cartels/families.
But they,ve told HM Gov’t that the black hole must be filled.
WTF?
It’s the Government that allows it, and the Government that has sold its integrity.
Keep the responsibility where it belongs. And it isn’t the bankers’ money, just as it isn’t the soldiers that declare war.
World Bank & IMF also tried to bribe Belarus to introduce Lockdown measures in the early days in 2020. That’s the good thing about dictators, they sometimes reveal things that others wouldn’t.
Impression they didn’t want anyone off-piste, as it would offer an alternative control dataset… confirms it’s all about politics and group think
Plus they spend much less than 10% of all revenue collected from motorists on our road infrastructure.
If the ptb are determined then absolutely yes, it will be achieved by indirect taxation et al…
Youll be simply priced off the road, unless you’re weathly that is…
If the government bans the sale of new petrol/diesel cars then the switch to electric cars is inevitable whether or not the majority of people want an EV. There’s only so long a car can be kept on the road for before you end up having to pay huge amounts every year to get it through an MOT.
It will lead to a starving population, or we will be able to drive ICE lorries.
If they want to get rid of petrol and diesel cars completely, all they have to do is ban the sale of petrol and diesel.
But if they do that, they will completely crash the economy. So it is vital that we keep buying petrol and diesel cars and keep buying the fuel.
Well, if you consider it likely that Dead Dogs F.C., consisting purely of Dead Dogs, will win the Premier League within 10 years then yes.
“Personally, I don’t see why it should be any different to anything else. We pay for all our other infrastructure services as we use them.”
So says John Armitt while omitting to mention that we are already paying extortionate levels of tax for the dubious right to access our roads. We pay VAT on all motor purchases, fuel duty and road tax. I assume these taxes will be abolished to allow for pay-per-mile?
Thought not.
This is not about paying for infrastructure it is about stealing from the population with an intention to destroy the country and its people. John Armitt is a liar.
I think john has forgotten where the money to build the road came from in the first place.
He’s also wrong. It’s nothing like other services.
With other services like water, electricity, gas, the more you consume the more it costs.
With roads it’s all capital expenditure and no marginal cost worth speaking of. The current system of road tax best represents the cost structure of providing and maintaining roads.
Pay per mile would be one of the more egregious forms of state theft, and the bar is already pretty high.
What we need in government are people with real power and no budgets. Having real power and massive budgets just mean that they are encouraged to spend it thoughtlessly. If they had to bring these ideas forward and justify them in a business plan, then we’d see the reality.
Only slightly Off-T
Simon Elmer with an extremely deep dig in to The Great Replacement. Once the natives have lost their cars the immigrants can take over.
A very long and detailed read but worth the effort – thirty minutes or so.
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2024/10/02/the-great-replacement-immigration-to-the-uk-part-one/
Thanks hux.
Thanks. Glad you appreciated it.
Thanks for this. Two very important articles.
Thank you.
Per mile taxation is wrong because we, the public, already own the raods and we pay more than enough to maintain them (not that they are maintaind properly nor even designed well).
We saw window tax in past centuries. What next – a breathing tax? A walking tax? A tax on criticism of politicians?
I am no lover of taxation but you can surely only say we pay more than enough to maintain them if you think the state is wasting money on other stuff that it shouldn’t be doing. Which is in my view the case, but doesn’t make charging for use wrong on principle. I suppose you make the case that the road network is fundamental to our way of life and well being and it should be paid for out of general taxation as it benefits everyone, and collecting specifically for use is just a waste of effort – I think I probably agree with that.
Fuel duty, and the vat they slap on it, already act as a pay per mile charge. They are saying it’s difficult on ev’s, when in reality it’s not difficult at all – all ev’s are tracked at all times and ‘online’ – also data can be downloaded from them on kwh used to charge… this is an excuse to get people off the road full stop
Solution. ICE continue paying road tax and VAT of fuel. EV pay per mile.
Exactly how are EVs tracked? Who tracks them, where does the information go, what information is stored? Where is the data on kwh used to charge downloaded from? My friend has an EV, he just plugs it into the wall, it could be a toaster.
I believe I read since 2019 all cars, and EVs in particular are ‘online’. Data being logged to onboard memory / cloud… inc remote disablement ‘feature’
I am sure they CAN be tracked, and that fleet operators do track them, but don’t know that private vehicles would be getting tracking without the owner’s consent. That said, for all I know my ICE car gets tracked – it’s got lots of tech in it which I have no clue about. My bet is if you asked a manufacturer if you were being tracked they would say no, but whether they would have to tell you the truth, I don’t know. Someone who understands this kind of thing would need to poke around in the car quite thoroughly to establish that.
It’s at least 10 years since a murder was solved when a man insisted he was not in the vicinity of his ex wife’s house when she was murdered, but data from his Mercedes put him right outside. This data was only supposed to be related to Mercedes in the event of a collision.
I read an article on Patrick Wood’s website about 6 months ago that stated all modern cars can collect vast amounts of data including where you go, how you drive, and what you say while you are in them. Just getting inside is all that is required to consider you have given your consent.
Interesting. I expect they can get at it if they want – so perhaps that will be the route they use for road charging
Western Auto Giants Accused Of Spying On Citizens For Chinese Government
Everything they need to implement road charging is already installed in new cars. They don’t tell you that, but it has been there for a few years now. All the CCTV will catch the older ones.
Automakers Are Feeding Your Trip Data To Insurance Companies listen 3min 41sec or read here NYTimes
California Tests Technocracy By Taxing Drivers For Miles Driven 6:31 epoch times
I might try and ask Volkswagen whether they have my data…
Somewhere in your paperwork,
or in the mmi of your car interface, they’ll be a t&cs page… or 100’s of pages…
in that small print somewhere I’m sure they’ll be a ‘use your car and you agree to x, y & z’ type clause
I have looked through the paperwork. Certainly they can access data when they connect for diagnostic purposes, but it seems like it’s not transmitted over the internet unless you sign up for their Car-Net service, which I have not. Of course that doesn’t mean they are not doing it without telling me – VW got a record fine for cheating as I recall so no strangers to bending or breaking rules.
Interesting – I wonder if anonymised ‘usage’ data is excluded if suitably obfuscated… there would be some value in that data, which is probably their first intention – to monetise it… I’ll have to take a look through the docs this end
I expect the data from the engine is pretty useful. Don’t know if they sell other stuff – probably. I use Apple Maps as a Satnav as I am lazy, have a poor memory and terrible sense of direction, and a lot of the road signs where I live are obscured by foliage – I am sure Apple are using that data, though it’s not tied to my car registration (that I know of…) – I guess the predicted arrival time must use the data as it updates in real time and takes account of hold ups further along the route.
This was interesting: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/
Blimey! I shouldn’t be surprised…
As the link says, if data is collectible, only a matter of time until it is, then only a matter of time before it’s monetised
Google maps use of anonymised location data is very clever – it’s used to show hold ups and navigate around them
Apple Maps predicted journey times are very accurate in my experience, and the dynamic route adjustment seems to work well.
When governments (or anyone, in fact, not just governments), when they involve themselves with things they do not need to do, they forget to do those things that they are supposed to do.
Mission creep is the term I think the armed forces use – our governments over last 20ish years sure suffer from that
“..it would all be monitored remotely”
The issue is that it’s likely ICE vehicles will be required to pay per mile AND pay fuel duty – another way to distort the market in favour of EVs.
What they have not properly thought about is the difficulty in tracking where vehicles have gone and how far. The beauty of fuel duty is that the state doesn’t need to know how and where the fuel gets used. With an EV charged with juice that just comes out of the wall, how do they know whether that juice has powered a toaster or a vehicle? So you’re left with cameras – but there are not cameras everywhere – yet. I expect most of my drives pass a few cameras, but there’s no way anyone could accurately calculate how far I have driven.
If fossil fuels are currently funding the great green monster then what will happen when fossil fuels are no longer used and the resulting economy stops functioning. Is this where ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ comes in?
In addition electric vehicles are considerably heavier then ICE vehicles which will result in roads needing to be resurfaced sooner as well as tyres being replaced sooner, while less of the vehicles are recyclable. One of the reasons we are being exhorted to get rid of fossil fuels is because they are ‘polluting’. Please see the two graphics below showing deaths from fossil fuels compared to deaths from air pollution. It’s not quite adding up is it?
Notice that the left graphic using numbers of deaths while the right hand using percentages.
Armitt is a career committee sitter, he’s been involved with just about everything that turned out to be a badly thought out plan to worsen the lives of Britons.
If he’s in favour of it, then I’m agin it.
He gives of the impression of someone that thinks he is right.
I worked on a Government scheme, abandoned before implementation, to introduce road pricing for trucks. It was going to cost almost as much as would be raised.
The complications are endless. Charging based on annual MOT mileage is one thing, tracking in real time is quite another.
There won’t be many electric trucks on the road for quite a while, they are way too expensive, but even so I would be amazed if the technology wasn’t already in most new trucks just waiting to be turned on.
Give that Mad Ed Miliband is taking a wrecking ball to our power generation, with electricity blackouts and rationing, most EV owners won’t be able to charge their milk-floats pretending to be cars and won’t be able to drive anywhere. So the pay-per-mile isn’t goint to raise much money. I wonder if the geniuses in government have thought of that?
I’d guess they have, and they don’t care, as it’ll contribute to the ‘less travel’ target
Imagine you drive 20 miles to work and your work mate only drives half a mile. With pay per mile this will mean you pay 40 times more to get to work than him. I realise that you would be paying more with your petrol car than him to get to work as well, but isn’t this a great opportunity to simply have a one of tax for all, so no matter how far you drive you pay the same? Ah but this does not help with governments goal of getting cars off the road and people into public transport does it? So in the end then, pay per mile is simply another way to attack and fleece drivers of private vehicles.
This is it’s imperative that Trump wins the White House and the globalists routed. Deportation and freedom of choice.
If this man gets his way, which he will, then what will pay-per-mile do to the cost of goods, food etc?
It’ll put them up hugely – no other option
That last graph is a lesson in how to lie with statistics – it’s not showing actual revenue from road taxes, just as a percentage of tax income – which itself has been rising for years due to all the other taxes the government likes to impose
Why not just charge EV owners the equivant petrol tax losses, their inevitable smart meters could easily give the appropriate amounts?
Because The RPTB want yet another reason to track and trace us.
I’m sure you are right, but for example my friend who has an EV charges it from a normal socket at home – it could be anything.
Not if the car is communicating itself it’s being charged and how much…
Good point
Choir preach but road charging is an other surveillance measure that forms the long planned the social credits system which will all be linked to our designer Blair & Co digital health ID. They’ll try and roll this out when they’ve ‘lost count of who’s in our country’ posing as the sensible ones for combatting illegal immigration to try and butter up ‘the far right’, which by that time will be every British person, who’s not a politician or MSM journalist, in the country.
The fact that they’re still talking about EVs though shows just how deranged and detached they are. By this time next year the entire industry will be dead and we’ll be sending ship loads of them to Indonesian landfill.
That’s my uplifting sunny morning prediction anyway.
Will ice-powered cars be expected to pay per mile, while still paying taxes and duties on petrol? Sounds a like a subsidy for volt-mobiles!
Does all road tax go into transport, not sure about that. More like into the Treasury. We already pay half of our fuel in taxes. Instead of trying to force EVs on the population over the fake crisis, why don’t they let the Markets decide, after all, is this not supposed to be a Capitalist system.
All those fools who bought an EV thinking they’d avoid driver taxes will be apoplectic.
It’s a hard lesson in the old adage that “a fool and his money are soon parted.”
The additional huge charge of vehicle over £40k was also quite funny – virtually all EV’s
fall into that ‘luxury’ bracket by nature
Jeff Buys Cars was right!
More battering of us rural folk…
How on earth are you going to get people to retro-fit what are essentially Smart Meters? You can force manufacturers to fit them to cars nobody is buying but it just ends up all the dealers and manufacturers go bust.
People, in reality, are going to just hang onto their real car; claiming 1 in 4 will be electric by 2030 is a pipe dream of the Chief Sky Fairy Mad Band.
In the upcoming budget fully expect all cars to be charged car tax; currently zero emissions like mine (no, it is not electric, it’s just classed Zero) are charged nothing. That will be changed to the level of petrol cars. Other cars will double. The basis being that if you charge less for zero emissions / electric people will be persuaded. In the end we will be a new Cuba but without the class of the old American cars.
Petrol I expect to go up at least £1 for diesel, 50p for petrol.
The people actually have the politicians over a barrel. Simply refuse to buy electric cars. Scrapping petrol and diesel has already been put back because nobody is buying electric.The politicians are screwed because they can’t risk all the manufacturers crashing (Volkswagen just announced its first ever factory closure). They can’t do without petrol revenues.
Their first ever possible closure in *Germany* I think was the kicker, they’ve restructured elsewhere before… but not at home. Certainly focused some German politicians minds I bet
Pay Per Mile is a pretty stupid idea overall unless you break every Yuman Wights law in the known Universe by forcing everyone to fit a tracker in their car. You can put camera’s on some roads but not every road; again human rights comes into play; why should people accept their drives being monitored?
As things stand there is one camera between my home and the nearest speed camera (2 miles roughly). How can they prove where I started from? In the other direction from home it is around 10 miles to the nearest camera. The sheer volume of data would crash any known system in the world, so camera’s cannot be practicable apart from specific journeys.
I suppose the first question is why a 78 year old is still holding down a job in government rather than being happily retired and looking after his garden but each to their own. He has also seemingly been totally subsumed by the blob since working in the private sector. As to his specific, roads are the only infrastructure that I already pay for through countless taxes, car tax, ved, fuel tax and an element of council tax for highways and byways. All other infrastructure, I pay no specific named tax for, but pay a service provider – although the BBC take a chunk of cash from me (I know, I know.). So unless he is proposing removing all of those named taxes for his pay per mile he can f right off. If his intent is ppm for major trunk roads, get ready for gridlock on all the minor roads and if he doesn’t believe me, look at the jams on the M6/M5 junction and the lack of traffic on the toll M6.
And do we think fuel duty will be scrapped if pay-per-mile is introduced? Of course not! Those of us who choose the convenience and reliability of the internal combustion engine to power our vehicles will pay double as our punishment for exacerbating the “climate emergency”.
“… as the switch to electric cars reduces fuel taxes…”
There is no switch to ‘electric cars’.
These folk live in their own little World.
I do not believe Labour would have put forward this idea without first agreeing it with the EU or being told by them to do it.