Road Pricing instead of Fuel Duty ?
 

i saw something on my phone about this and being NON technical i wondered if anyone else has heard any details ?
i suspect it was nothing but it mentioned the following....

fuel duty could be swapped for Road pricing as motorists warm to the idea.
insurance companys could charge for the miles we do on yearly policies.
sat-nav could play a part in calculating costs.
sounds a bit Big Brother to me.

interesting if you only do a few miles
not so if you travel a lot

even if they dropped fuel duty it would probably be 70p a litre?
then fuel companys have a green light to increase those costs
yet again (stuff the motorist shall we)

it was an alert on my phone which has disappeared now +++

It's been mentioned a few times over the years. I doubt anything will come of it. Governments like predictable incomes. Road tax income is easy to predict, usage income not so much.

There is a company that does offer insurance based on miles travelled, but despite several times stating they would 'soon be available in Northern Ireland as well', it's never happened over the course of 3-4 years of checking. Can't remember their name though.

UPDATE: Their name is 'By Miles'. Duh! And they still don't do Northern Ireland despite their underwriters operating here. Might suit people who do long journeys as it's capped at 150 miles per day.

Considering they raised £28 billion from fuel duty in 2019-20, I don't see them wanting to give up on that cash cow. We already pay 57.95p/litre on fuel duty plus 20% VAT on top of that, and the worst thing is that it's the retailers that take the abuse when the price goes up, despite them only getting around 5p per litre sold.

Inevitable.

For my sins I actually worked on a project under an old labour administration that was trialling road user charging. We ran a technology demonstrator (after track trials) with gantries, DSRC tags and beacons, back office with ANPR, even to the point of generating 'real' bills for real drivers (they were never sent out, obviously!).

Alongside intelligent speed adaptation (another project I was deeply involved with!) it was seen as very big brother, and when the public appetite for big government dropped off, so did the enthusiasm for these projects.

What really killed RUC was a transport minister stating that it would be revenue neutral. If you think about the costs involved in infrastructure (both physical and organisational) compared to the cost of running a website that you log in to once a year in order to cough up for VED, that would mean a MASSIVE hit to the public purse.

There were 2 things predominantly driving RUC - a drop in VED and fuel duty income due to more low VED cars/hybrids appearing, and congestion/air quality. Every time one of those things becomes a focus of debate, the old RUC chestnut reappears!

Something will need to change IF we ever get to the panacea by 2030 of which BoJo speaks, but has little power to influence, and fuel duty income falls substantially (it's interesting data to look at in terms of how quickly cars expire) but if we see anything before 2040 I'd be utterly amazed.

GPS simply isn't robust enough in terms of accuracy (the USA can turn the accuracy down whenever they feel like it for strategic reasons and/or if satellites are in short supply), we're no longer signed up to full fat Galileo either, and you need something to deal with those dropouts that occur in most urban environments as a result of 'canyons' formed by tall buildings (try using Google maps or similar after you've just walked out of a building in London or similarly built up city). It could be your odometer, but that's ripe for fraud. Blocking GPS signals requires some tin foil over the receiver (remembering that GPS is a broadbast signal from space, so it's power is VERY low!) and you can jam an entire area with a device the size of a shoe box (including the battery to power it)

Insurers do it because SOME data on driver behaviour for young drivers OUGHT to provide an indicator of their underlying risk. It's a different, but still risk-based, decision as to what to charge. There are plenty of examples of these black boxes snapping to the wrong road if you're driving along. If you are driving on a motorway next to a 30mph road and it decides you are actually on the 30mph road, it'll think you're doing over double the speed limit......

It's a minefield and we're nowhere near ready in technology terms

The most likely option that might just be plausible in my lifetime is something based on an annual/regular odometer reading, taken at MOT or tax renewal.
Ripe for fraud as Adrian says and not (currently) applicable to vehicles less than 4 years old unless you're also asked for evidence at road tax time.
Though modern cars, given the amount of data recorded and the means of doing so, are probably less easy to "clock".

And foreign travel would mess things up rather unless there's a mechanism to record exit/entry data.

But given the number of cars on leases and other data readily available to cross-check I can see this happening, or at least being offered as an option.
The number of vehicles drifting into "lower-tax" brackets is becoming a serious revenue issue, so don't expect your EVs to escape for long. :tuttut:

As for "By Miles" insurance I've looked at versions of that several times and it never made any economic sense for me.

Cameras, cameras everywhere, and no more fuel to drink...
 

I don't get the idea that this is somehow implausible, even in the very near future. The UK already has more surveillance cameras than practically every other country, and such systems are already proven and accepted - e.g. I paid for my NCP parking in Liverpool online on Monday, via ANPR, dead easy - and these existing technologies can be easily extended, practically everywhere.

It'll certainly be the norm within a decade, but will more probably be introduced within 5 years, as that's when revenues from fuel duty will really start to decline.

^^ I agree. As fuel usage will drop, so will the revenue and there must be a few ideas being thrown around behind closed doors. It's also the drop in VED as EVs are exempt, unless they restructure the whole thing to something like a capped amount depending on power output or vehicle price when new

It'll be much more cost effective to simply raise VED on EVs, like it used to be back in the day with a pretty much uniform rate across the board.

Cheaper to implement that the ANPR stuff mentioned - how would that work in the far reaches of the country where the infrastructure does not exist?

[quote=sarg;167218]It'll be much more cost effective to simply raise VED on EVs, like it used to be back in the day with a pretty much uniform rate across the board.

Yes Sarg that makes sence
but all the EV owners wont like it
DVLA have been messing around since 2006 mostly
so we shall wait and see what the (rip off boffins) at DVLA come up with next

i liked it better when it was RFL yes Road Fund Licence :tuttut: