Road Tax

[jetpilot]

I always watch a bit of Sky News before heading out in the mornings. One of the stories today was they estimate local councils need up to 10bn to mend potholes.

Sounds like Road Tax is failing on epic proportions, scrap the whole thing in my eyes, get rid of the whole infrastructure and put . 1 of a penny on a litre on fuel, how much more convenient would that be, 1000s saved on admin, 1000\'s saved on jobs, 1000\'s saved on sorn and all that other related rubbish and not one single person could get away without paying!

[AtomicRex]

Go further and stick 5p on a litre of fuel and give everyone 3rd party insurance!
 
that would cut down on the number of prosecutions related to uninsured drivers.  Plus anyone travelling over from the continient would automatically be insured.  Not sure if it would put up fraud..but it would guarantee someone would be both insured and taxed.  You would only need to worry about MOTs.
 
On the MOT note...seeing as you are up for a discussion...I think they should be every 6 months, regardless of age, would create plenty of jobs and money for the treasury.  But my wifes car did 100k miles in its first 3 years.....no need to assess its road worthiness.  You can walk into an MOT station and get 13 months ticket with a stack of advisories and then go off and do 40,000 miles.  Just daft!

[jetpilot]

Without looking i guess it would be easy to see how many litres of fuel are sold in the UK.

I reckon 1p a litre would cover both road tax and 3rd party insurance, in all fairness in this day and age of cuts i cannot think of a reason why they dont do it, except for the people that would naturally loose their jobs due to the HUGE decrease in admin.

I guess thats why so many people lack faith in any government, when their stand point is always, "we owe lots of money, lets put fuel, vat etc up", no imagination to get rid of draconium systems that actually dont work any more.

Mots, never really considered the Mot. Again i guess its a very dated system and seems a bit farcical when your Mot is literally not worth the paper its written on as soon as you drive off the garage forecourt. However, i think every 6 months would p*ss off a lot of people and probably increase the rate of un mot\'d vehicles on the road. Unless of course you halved the price or something similar. I do have a couple of friends with testing stations and the newer system annoys them as they have to allow a certain amount of time for the car to be logged into the system whilst testing, although with 2 or 3 checking the car over it can be done much quicker. So in essence they are loosing money because "someone" decided thats how long it takes to test a car thoroughly.

Perhaps you could have a half yearly top up test which would literally check, tyres, brakes and anything deemed critically dangerous that would put you or anyone else in harm!

[dthebuk]

I am extremely in favour of this. But what will happen to the people selling insurance and collecting road tax. If they\'re not working, how will they get taxed?

[AtomicRex]

I think its a bit unfair to say the government doesn\'t recognise the antiquated systems that are in place...they are looking to merge the NI into a single tax system for one.
 
VAT needed to go onto fuel as well as it isn\'t possible to split the VAT rates for different items.  Its a sad truth but we do owe lots of money, so the sooner we get shot of spending the annual budget of most smaller countries on interest payments the better!  Give it a couple of years and we\'ll be in a better place...well I hope so!
 
As for insurance....I might need to rethink that idea!  If we look at an average car doing 30mpg and covering 12,000 miles per year.  That is 1816L of fuel.  If the average 3rd party insurance is £400 per year, that would require an increase of 22p per litre!  Don\'t think that would work!  But then again seeing as 33% of our premiums go towards paying uninsured drivers that might be brought down to 14p...would that be acceptable?

I don\'t see why having an MOT done every 6 months would be a bind....it might be that it would bring insurance premiums down.  Plus it would allow for more revenue to be brought in to garages...and yes the system does need to be streamlined a little....maybe that could be done too.

[Carbon RX]

I must say fundamentally, we only owe any money as a nation due to corprations ruling the world and NOT governments. This notion is only one of historic sentiment as governments borrow the money from PRIVATE banks such as federal reserve and BoE...? oh and at interest! so how is it ever going to be possible to get out of debt i ask you guys? we will forever continue paying out more to cover the constant rise of interest. This is why a third world country will never make it out of poverty, but instead have every infrastructure privatised by external foreign corportions they have to offer.... I hate this system!
 
The money collected from all of us would be ample to fix our roads and supply the service we expect, however this is not the case? Money management is the key, plus not all funds collected in a Tax is spent on the intended purpose of collection, its used to pay off the ever increasing national debt...
 
The only answer is for the people of each nation to uprise and say \'NO MORE!\', we understand whats going on with the monetary system and were not lining the fat cats pockets any longer!
 
The currency we use as a nation or union should not be controlled by private busineses in my humble opinion, it should be controlled by the state who WE actually elect into power and not the fat cats keeping their epic money making epires safe from all us idiots by selecting people we can vote for to keep their interests safe and not ours....
 
Unless radical change happens, it sadly will make little difference thb.

[Lacey]

Wait are MOT\'s required every 6 months now???

[Prof]

No thank god !
 
MOT once a year is more than enough, but I suppose it\'s there to make sure people don\'t drive dangerous wrecks around. :Hammer
 
I think the idea of money on fuel to cover road fund is excellent, but how are we going to tax the cyclists
 
As for Insurance - I\'d start by getting rid of Thatcham Approval - it isn\'t what it once was, and I\'ve seen some crap alarm installations done by so called professionals.
 
Fit trackers instead and do away with Thatcham Alarms all together - fit what you want to - and have the tracker as the approved item to keep the insurance chappies happy.

[AtomicRex]

I had an insurance company insist I put a tracker on the Atom I built!  I did say to them surely this needs to be concealed?  Then sent them a picture of the car!  They still insisted that it would be a requirement!! :Hammer

[jetpilot]

I have just done a little digging, in 08 apparently roughly 21 billion litres of fuel were sold! So by putting fuel up 1p adds £21bn, so in my maths, as per Atomic, £400 a year average 3rd party x 31 million cars equals roughly 127.5bn, so 6p a litre roughly covers it!

And perhaps as Carbon says, although off topic, i cant actually see us paying of 875bn of private sector debt when our borrowing this year is supposedly going to be 145bn.

Back on topic, get rid of tax and lots of wasted money and admin, it would be a fairer system and would you notice 1p extra at the pumps than finding £200+ a throw for your road tax.

[leon]

I think putting the price of fuel up only solves one issue and raises many more. The obvious one I see is the price of haulage (sea,air,land) will go up and that will put up the price of everything else up, supermarkets etc are not going to take the hit on cost. They will just pass it down to the customer.

Smaller MOTs every 6 months could be a good idea! If it was literally a small test to confirm the basics as I know how much of a bind passing a 7 can be!

Killing the insurance industry is also a BAD thing for the UK a lot of business are built around supporting that industry, killing the insurance industry would also kill these smaller independents. Alarm companies for example won’t be as profitable as any old flashing LED is a deterrent against thief’s and since there would be no push to have an expensive system from insurance companies less of these alarms would be sold.

And a revolt.. Yeah right :3 my favourite thing about this was some graffiti I saw in a public toilet... "ANARCHY RULES!" underneath was written "No it doesn’t that’s the point."

I hate economics! And I hate pointless bureaucracy we have in this country.

If you\'ve made it to the bottom of my rant congratulations, Ill be sat in the corner rocking backwards and forwards singing god save the queen.

[AtomicRex]

I was only looking to offer 3rd party insurance.  The insurance companies would have an easier time just offering fully comprehensive and fire/theft policies...so wouldn\'t do anything to the companies.  Plus if the 3rd party element was a government backed scheme the insurance companies wouldn\'t suffer from fraud as much.  This would also not effect the alarm companies.

[jetpilot]

I thought most insurance companies were running at a loss??

And as Atomic says, i would say a vast percentage would still want comprehensive cover etc, therefore streamlining the industry, hopefully for bigger profits.

Maybe nice to start small as per the op, i cant think of a single benefit to a "road tax" in this current climate.

[AtomicRex]

I do agree....that getting rid of the road tax would be a good idea...I hate the fact it is incorrectly labled anyway!  Non of the monies actually go into the roads.....it is straight into the treasury and split from there on in.  In the same way as these so called Green taxes for environmental issues are taken....they dont get ploughed back into any green measures!

[leon]

Ahh yeah i agree with giving some form of 3rd party cover as standard that would make things a lot easier :Thumbs-up the cynic in me thinks that the insurance companies would still cry foul at the loss of those lovely new driver premiums. Speaking of taxes what\'s with the price of LPG recently anyway it seems to have gone up a LOT faster than the other fuels.