Really worried about the possibility of “pay per mile”

[Yorkiepud2614]

I’ve been seeing more and more about this new proposal “pay per mile” that would replace car duty (I think). Which the average household bill somewhere around £450 - £600. Lots of reports that it may come in this October.
Living in the Highlands this would completely cripple us. Do people really think the new government will bring this change in?

Exactly. How is the government going to finance building all the new schools, hospitals, GP services, libraries, sports centres, etc., so that people will have such facilities within 15 minutes? It's nonsensical. Even in cities, you'd need several of each dotted around the city so everyone was within 15 minutes.

I can't even drive to our nearest hospital or secondary school, library or sports centre within 15 minutes, let alone walk or cycle!

My point was, 15 minute towns are a good, normal thing. Nothing to be afraid of, and not a conspiracy to take away your freedom like the poster I was responding to said.

...when bringing it forward was a condition of the assistance provided as a result of the Covid lockdowns.

People against them do seem to like using his surname a lot, don't they? So unlike using de Pfeffel Johnson's or Ken Livingstone's. I wonder why?

Well they could start by actually considering it when planning houses. Maybe only allow building where there are reasonable facilities already/ factor it in.

Since we have approximately 2,500 posts with some variation on “I AM RURAL, WE HAVE NO PUBLIC TRANSPORT, THIS IS NOT FAIR”, can I invite people to actually do a bit of research online? Because various think-tanks, organizations and writers have talked and written about road pricing schemes and discussed practical setups that would be most likely to be set in.

These people are not stupid, and they KNOW that PT is largely a nonstarter in the countryside.

All the road pricing schemes I have seen (there are various models and setups which it could be based on) explicitly proposed and set out various possible measures for ensuring that rural residents will not suffer and may actually save money compared to the current situation for rural drivers of ICE vehicles.

https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/uk/pdf/2021/05/future-of-road-pricing.pdf
https://cps.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/CPS_BMG-Road-Pricing-Focus-Group-Note.pdf

@taxguru - good point if that's what they do. We certainly fill up in France before we come home after a holiday.
I just hope that if it does come in, the annual VED tax is removed. VED plus paying per mile will hit commuters hard as well as for everyone else who need to get somewhere where there is no direct bus or train route (plenty of towns where we live).

These people are not stupid

We frankly don’t know that. But they in any case seem entirely disconnected with the government and on the first page say the money should be ring fenced.

This is not where the BBC article says the money is needed.

PPM schemes will ensure that rural residents do not have to pay punishing amounts of money (and if PPM somehow did mean that rural residents did end up paying a lot, the lack of amenities would presumably reverse itself, as residents’ becoming more reluctant to drive would result in more demand for amenities within their village). At the end of the day, it is not the government’s job to set up or subsidize amenities or shops within villages - they can and should exist only to the extent that there is actually demand for them.

I do think that a village of 1500 people without even a single shop(!) which someone talked about upthread is a bit weird, and suggests that everyone in the village is just flopping into the car and driving into the nearest retail park for literally everything, even a pint of milk. I mean, it’s their choice - as long as they switch to electric vehicles, I don’t really care that much if British villagers choose to live very very car dependent lives, it’s their business - but privately it does make me wonder about what the point of “village life” is, in such circumstances. I don’t want to live rurally full time, but I can see the charm of a village where cars are used for longer journeys but there are a few shops and a pub or cafe in the center of the village and everyone strolls over there to get last-minute bits and pieces of shopping and have a drink or coffee and bump into friends. If a village has absolutely no “center” at all, I wonder what the appeal of this lifestyle is.

We've got a denser population, so more scope for facilities within walking distance and viable public transport for a larger proportion of the population.

Public transport is never going to work for everyone at a manageable cost, but we could do better. But part of that improvement requires more people using it instead of driving even if it's slightly more inconvenient.

Exactly. “We have to drive everywhere as we have so many people and cities are so big” is the weirdest take ever - it’s literally the opposite way round.

Big dense cities tend to work best with public transport, walking and biking as the main transport - there is simply no space to cram all the cars and parking in there, and big dense populations provide the ridership levels necessary for public transport to work efficiently.

Cars tend to be the best way of moving about in rural areas, where populations are small and thinly scattered across large areas, Bikes can work sometimes but distances are often too large, and public transport just doesn’t work well in the countryside - governments spend eye watering amounts of money on buses that are simply never going to be convenient enough for rural residents.

Well it's the obvious next step to reduce our freedom of choice further....

This is another in the series of them and us set ups why not now set rural against city. Pretty sure Labour are rushing through all of the unpopular things now, so we all forget in 4 years time and vote them back in.

Those of is impacted by ULEZ predicted this would happen. The amount of ULEZ cameras weren’t going up in record time for just the alleged small amount of cars impacted by ULEZ.

I live in a rural area and have been left almost trapped and very depressed because of ULEZ, the cost of cars have massively increased so it hasn’t been a case of just easily replacing my 8/9 year old car.

According one poster even though we live in London (we do not live in London according to their thoughts)

Ulez is a diaster

@GreenTeaLikesMe

I do think that a village of 1500 people without even a single shop(!) which someone talked about upthread is a bit weird, and suggests that everyone in the village is just flopping into the car and driving into the nearest retail park for literally everything, even a pint of milk. I mean, it’s their choice

It's not "their choice" when the shops close down is it? You can't force a shop to stay open when, despite selling lots of milk, the overheads are just too high. Most shops havn't closed down due to lack of customers, they've closed down due to ever increasing costs, i.e. power, staffing, rates, rent, security, waste disposal, etc.

That IS entirely within governmental control as government fixes tax rates, minimum wage, business rates. Governments could offer initiatives and incentives for rural businesses if they wanted to. Successive governments have chosen not to. Governments have also closed local amenities such as schools, libraries, etc., which also reduce footfall to local shops. It's governments who grant planning permission and incentives for new retail parks and out of town supermarkets. By that, I mean both local and national governments, none of who seem remotely interested in small businesses and local amenities.

It's not "their choice" when the shops close down is it?

Their choice to shop elsewhere is often the reason they haven’t got the option to use the village shop. It closed down due to lack of custom.

I live in a large village and we have two smallish shops. So I can buy milk, bread. Can’t do a weekly shop. Can’t even buy Quorn or gluten free bread for Dd. Supermarkets aren’t central in town and not particularly accessible by public transport. So they’d be a car trip for sure.

Previously I’ve lived in two small villages where I could have walked a ten mile round trip and not hit a single shop. Neither village were on a bus route. As a teen I had to cycle a 5 mile round trip each day to get a bus to college.

theres plenty of villages in my home county which could be ten miles from a shop. But yes, I get the argument that currently they pay more in fuel. If this road tax was instead of fuel duty I’d think fair enough. Sadly for the non electric car owners both will be in place. And claim that’s a green policy to encourage people to give up petrol/diesel. 🤨

And it had a lack of custom due to being more expensive.

my village has a Co-op, has always been extortionate. The other shop is a One Stop which is owned by .tesco and stocks Tesco products and the prices can be significantly more than in the Tesco 8 miles up the road. It all gets delivered in a big Tesco lorry.

But no one is saying “don’t drive”. The point is to reduce non-essential car journeys, and discourage a ten mile car trip for a pint of milk.

I actually agree that governments need to look carefully at things like business rates and costs faced by small business (not just for rural areas, I mean, but generally). That said, most villages I know do have a couple of shops and a pub or cafe etc.; if a specific village of 1500 has absolutely nothing, I do feel confident in saying that lack of demand/custom is the most likely reason. As I say, “Their choice”; provided rural residents are happy to switch to EVs once it becomes feasible, it’s OK for them to choose to use mostly shopping centers.

I would say that “Some villages don’t have a shop” is not a good reason for arguing against PPM road pricing. Either PPM road pricing will be kept reasonably cheap for rural residents, or it will not. If it’s a similar price to the amount people currently spend on fuel duty/fuel/VED, then residents can continue to drive to retail centers like they do now. If road pricing does end up being expensive for rural residents (which is unlikely - there are plenty of ways of managing this), then demand for shops and services within villages is likely to grow as a result, and they will spring up in response.

Heavier vehicles will presumably pay more per mile travelled than lighter ones?
That makes sense to me since the heavier the vehicle the more road damage it causes.

I know I might be stating the bleeding obvious but why not just tax car ownership? Forget the emissions. Everyone plays a flat rate of tax. Or is that just madness?

I'm not sure how that would work with regards those who are tax excempt.

We pay no car tax as ds is disabled but pay through filling up with petrol - and driving more because of said disability!

Well, I wouldn't be very happy as I have a small car and drive less than 2000 miles a year, why should I pay the same as someone that drives 30,000 miles in some large heavy thing

Electric vehicles are heavier than ice vehicles, and the trend has been for ever increasing car sizes as well. Heavier cars doing more journeys is a recipe for unsustainable wear and tear on roads.

I’m the one who posted about a village of 1500 people with no shop. We used to have a shop but it closed down, presumably because people found it much more straightforward to jump in a car and drive to Tesco. Facilitating car useage has led to the decline of many local amenities. We use a milkman to limit “nipping out” for stuff.

We also have a bonkers planning system that means that our neighbouring village (of a similar size) that has a mainline train station where people can get two trains an hour to London and other big towns, has seen absolutely minimal development over the last decade, despite us being in one of the fastest growing areas of the UK. Development has been prioritised in areas where there are no NIMBYs to object, rather than in areas where it is possible to support less car useage.

Errr because maybe they have to do that for work! Honestly a tax like this will just force people out of business. If you own a car you. An pay tax. Or don’t own a car.