Possibly, I had a look at their website and they still do one Mercedes model with the alternatives being VW, Ford, Vauxhall, and Citroën. The advance payment from the user (i.e the person’s own money) varies between choices.
These are all mostly adapted commercial vehicles. Often, they are intended as family vehicles that have disabled adaptations, so it isn’t just going to be a Transit van with a ramp.
On the website, they state that they want half of all leases to be of British built cars, so effectively they have excluded German csrs, which would have been illegal under EU rules.
I can see this causing some issues, as there are very few small MPVs on sale, which have always been popular Motability cars. BMW and Mercedes have been amongst the last to still sell them.
Yes, I need to get my head around it. Between locking myself in the garage last night for an hour and a bit, and then watching our shit show I’m out the loop on the changes.
I’m getting the impression that it is working people in what most would call decent salary brackets and businesses picking up the bill again.
Probably. If I remember correctly, this is where anything greater than £X is paid into a pension to avoid tax and NI, rather than additional contributions that incur employer NI but are still income tax exempt.
I’m assuming that some firms have been taking the piss with it, but then everyone suffers.
I think the Chancellor (or an article I read) explicitly referenced people working in the City and funnelling large bonuses into the pensions this way.
I can guarantee that someone will have listed all the pros and cons in great detail. However, it is not the responsibility of civil servants to make actual policy decisions. That’s what the ministers are for.
The problems I see with this are that the Treasury is only concentrating on the revenue loss not the environmental or greater economic impacts.
Applying a per mile charge does nothing to tackle congestion and actually favours vehicles with tailpipe emissions.
Collecting the mileage information via MOT makes clocking cars even more attractive.
The big attraction of fuel duty is that it is cheap and simple to collect, difficult to evade, and encourages fuel efficiency. Per mile charges do none of these things.
I wouldnt be against a per mile duty for diesel and petrol cars provided they could overcome the data gathering side. Environmentally it makes sense. Bigger cars, doing bigger miles pays more etc. Perhaps some dispensation for goods vehicles and so on.
Not all EVs are equal. Many are huge behemoths. However, some are significantly more fuel efficient than others. A per mile charge doesn’t reflect this.
They looked at per mile charges for all vehicles in the early 2000s and it was impractical with lots of undesired effects, particularly in remote areas.
They also messed about with the company vehicle taxation and came up with something that heavily favoured diesel vehicles. Often inappropriately. The problem with this was that it forced the fleet market in that direction and that, in turn, flooded the second hand market with vehicles that no one wanted or needed.
The current change will stifle the electric vehicle market at a time that you want to be actively encouraging it. As I said earlier. This looks like a Treasury policy, not a transport, environment or economy one.
I’ve literally just had a flier and questionnaire from them through the post. How much did that cost along with the Cardiff office address they appear to have?
Another issue with the mileage tax on electric / hybrid cars is why should you be paying a tax on the mileage you do abroad? I don’t know what the answer is, maybe a compulsory ‘black-box’ in them, to record it. But that would be easier to get around (I expect) and how do you retrofit them. There needs to be some way of collecting all the revenue that will be lost from fuel duty in future, but I don’t know what.
To be effective it needs to be reasonably easy to implement. Black boxes etc isn’t going to work. MOT info post three years seems sensible, they would just need to incorporate recorded mileage into sales/transfer of ownership records. Pre-MOT get people to pay each year what they’ve used and catch any discrepancies at time of sale / first MOT.
Important note that this does not impact regular hybrid cars (self charging, mild etc), just plugin hybrids - the reporting/messaging has been pretty poor at making that clear. It wouldn’t make sense for regular hybrids unless you were including all vehicles.
Maybe they could cut his bar tab by 50%? That would probably save enough cash to solve world hunger, childhood poverty around the world and end homelessness.
