ROAD TAX DODGING: A CUNNING PLAN

The headline in Your Letters of 20 January ‘Putting the road tax record straight’, followed by Karl Sheridan’s letter, does not put the record straight. It is pointless speculating why so many owners of cars over 10 years old can’t or won’t pay their car tax, when Mr Sheridan continues to assume that ‘45% of owners of cars 10 years old and over are failing to pay road tax’, as he stated in his 16/23 December 2015 issue letter.

My letter in the 13 January issue repeated what the DVLA said, namely that ‘Of the unlicensed vehicles in the survey, 45% of these cars were more than 10 years old. There are 29.1 million cars on the road, and the DVLA says that 560 000 are untaxed, which is about 1.9% of the total, and 45% (the cars over 10 years old) of 560 000 is 252,000. There are about 4,365,000 cars over 10 years old, so with 252,000 untaxed, that makes 5.8% of cars ten years old or more that are untaxed, not 45%.

Now that it is no longer possible to display a current tax disc (it used to be an offence not to display a tax disc, even if you had one), it must be so much more tempting for some, not to bother.

If 14 pence more tax was put on a litre of fuel, that would replace the car tax per year that the Government charges. No bureaucracy, no non-payers; the more you use, the more you pay, or is that too simple? No more separate car tax. David Myers, Ulverston, Cumbria

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