ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU CHOKE!
First we were bribed to buy diesel cars. Now they want to tax us for doing so. One furious driver says it’s . . .
When I bought my diesel-powered Citroen C5 estate six years ago, the last thing on my mind was that I would end up being treated as an environmental vandal by a government minister.
The rates for road tax seemed to be encouraging me to buy a diesel car. With lower carbon emissions, my new car fell into a much lower taxation band than my old petrolpowered Peugeot 406.
It is quite a shock, then, to hear Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin warning motorists like me that we face a hike in taxes designed to punish us for doing what we thought was the right thing and buying a diesel car.
Mr McLoughlin now says incentives introduced by Gordon Brown in 2001, which led to the number of diesel cars on Britain’s roads more than doubling from 3.45 million to 8.1 million, were utterly misguided. And he says diesel car owners will have to pay an extra tax in future to make amends.
his argument is based on the fact that, although diesels emit less carbon mile for mile than petrol cars, they emit dangerously high levels of particulates — tiny soot particles — and nitrogen oxides (nOx).
According to an estimate by Frank Kelly, professor of environmental health at King’s College London, diesel engines could be responsible for a quarter of the 29,000 premature deaths in Britain that are attributed to air pollution.
Chancellor Gordon Brown overlooked the problem diesels have with particulates and nitrogen oxides because, like many modernday policymakers, he was obsessed with carbon emissions.
By encouraging drivers to switch to diesel engines using tax incentives, he thought he could help achieve the targets the Blair government had pledged on CO2 reductions at the 1997 Kyoto climate-change summit.
I can accept that Gordon Brown might have been misguided in his obsession with reducing CO2 by encouraging us all to buy diesel engines — an error which, incidentally, the coalition subsequently did nothing to correct. But it is nothing less than an outrage that motorists like me, who were encouraged by those tax policies to buy cars in good faith, should now be punished for doing so.
Patrick McLoughlin didn’t say how much diesel car owners will be stung for in his proposed ‘toxic tax’. That, he said, was a matter for the Chancellor. But his comments unmistakably suggested that the Government will act ruthlessly to drive diesels off the road.
At the same time, one of his aides dismissed a proposal by Boris Johnson — and backed by his successor as London mayor, Sadiq Khan — for a ‘scrappage’ scheme that would ‘incentivise’ motorists to trade in their diesels for a petrol car. ‘Transferring large amounts of money to people who are already relatively well off to help them buy a new car would be pretty regressive,’ pronounced McLoughlin.
But this is penny-pinching hypocrisy of the highest order. It isn’t only wealthy people who have fallen for government incentives to buy diesel cars.
mAny of the smallest cars on the road are now diesel. A lot of diesel vehicles have been bought second-hand by motorists who are anything but well off, and for whom a saving in road tax was an important factor.
It would be wholly wrong now to price these vehicles off the road. Many of them are relied upon by small tradesmen, while for people in rural areas, cars are a lifeline.
Already, London has announced a £12.50-a-day charge for diesel cars entering central areas of the capital — on top of the congestion charge. Other cities, too, are considering charges or outright bans for diesels.
I don’t want to belittle air pollution. My own son has suffered from (thankfully mild) asthma and I know the anguish suffered by parents when their children find difficulty in breathing. The very last thing I, and most people who bought diesel cars, want is to be responsible for causing deaths through pollution.
Already, I have made changes to the way I use my car. I try to use it only for longer journeys, so the engine stays warm and hopefully it emits less pollution.
I try to accelerate only lightly, too — it is fast acceleration that really drives up pollution from a diesel car, as you can see in the puff of black smoke often emitted by a diesel when it draws away from traffic lights. For shorter journeys, I try to use my wife’s small petrol car as much as possible.
But if diesels do have to be driven off the roads in order to clean the air and save lives, surely the Government, which gave wrongful advice, should be bearing the cost from its own funds.
And why isn’t Volkswagen footing its part of the bill, having been caught out blatantly cheating last year on the emissions tests that were designed to keep a tab on pollutants from diesel engines, a deceit almost certainly practised by other manufacturers?
The Volkswagen scandal shows how utterly useless the eU is when it comes to protecting the environment. In recent weeks we’ve had environment Secretary Liz Truss teaming up with ed Miliband to make the extraordinary claim that the ‘global environment’ would be under threat if Britain leaves the eU.
yet when it came to the air pollution that is killing thousands of people a year, the european Union’s regulators — in hock to the car manufacturers’ lobby — were nowhere to be seen.
It is no thanks to the eU that Volkswagen was caught out cheating on emissions tests. The scandal was uncovered by the University of Virginia. Significantly, it is U.S. authorities that are taking tough action against the car company.
Pathetically, the european Commission’s first response was to propose weakening the diesel emissions tests to make it easier for manufacturers to pass them — effectively rewarding Volkswagen for cheating.
Why is the eU — which fusses over our light bulbs and has banned powerful vacuum cleaners, claiming they damage the environment — so feeble when dealing with a car company shown to have brazenly cheated on emissions tests, and whose cars have been pumping out lethal doses of pollution?
It goes to the heart of everything that is wrong with the eU. The German car industry has been spared because it is a hugely powerful lobby and knows how to get its way with the unelected, unaccountable european Commission.
As a result, U.S. and european motorists have been treated by Volkswagen in completely different ways. In America, Volkswagen is negotiating an agreement with regulators whereby the company would offer to buy back 500,000 cars that have been affected by the scandal, at a price equivalent to their value before the scandal erupted last September.
In addition, owners would receive compensation in cash, though how much has not yet been disclosed. In europe, by contrast, VW reached an agreement this week with German authorities only to fix the affected cars to make them compliant with environmental rules.
Owners will have to take their cars to a garage to be modified but will not be offered any compensation, nor given the chance to sell their vehicles back to Volkswagen.
British owners have yet to hear about their vehicles, but they are likely to be offered the same deal as German owners.
VOLKSWAGen at first hinted that european owners would receive compensation, but now claims this won’t be necessary because the cars’ resale value isn’t affected. It is a ridiculous assertion. how can their second-hand value not be affected by the scandal? Motorists have been mis-sold vehicles on the basis of pollution and fuel-consumption data that turns out to have been fiddled. Volkswagen — which despite the scandal recorded pre-tax profits of £2.4billion in the first quarter of this year — deserves to be taken to the cleaners.
As for our own Government, why should we pay any attention to the advice it spews out in future?
Whether it is telling us to eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day or drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week, I will take it all with a hefty pinch of salt — knowing that ministers might soon be telling us completely the opposite, and probably trying to tax us for following their original advice.