fuel duty heros

mollycat

Even accepting the tax element of a litre of petrol is necessary, the price of it should STILL come down....when the price of a barrel of oil drops.

It's when this doesnt happen that people rightly get angry.

pitkin2020

mollycat wrote: »

Even accepting the tax element of a litre of petrol is necessary, the price of it should STILL come down....when the price of a barrel of oil drops.

It's when this doesnt happen that people rightly get angry.

Thats the fuel companies decision though not to pass on the savings to the final consumer.
It can also take a fortnight + from the price of oil dropping to the forecourt prices dropping.

mollycat

pitkin2020 wrote: »

Thats the fuel companies decision though not to pass on the savings to the final consumer.
.

Erm, Yes; sorry, i thought that would obvious to every one!!

whatmichaelsays

pitkin2020 wrote: »

Thats the fuel companies decision though not to pass on the savings to the final consumer.
It can also take a fortnight + from the price of oil dropping to the forecourt prices dropping.

The $ rate also has an effect. It's no good the oil trading rate coming down if the £ becomes weaker against the $

whatmichaelsays

Lum wrote: »

Well to be honest, services that everyone uses should be paid for by everyone, which would mean a rise in income tax. I don't really see why certain groups should be treated as cash cows to subsidise the rest of the country.

The tax system has always been set up in a way where certain groups will pay more than others, usually on the basis of income. As somebody else has mentioned, you could just start adding £500 to everybody's PAYE bill but as the 10p tax fiasco proved, it's not that easy. You can't add £500 onto the tax bill of low earners because it hits them too hard which means that you have to get higher earners to pay extra - and that's not palatable either. So who else pays? There is the argument that road users use more of the country's basic infrastructure - in that sense is passing a larger chunk of the tax burden onto them justified?

Don't get me wrong, I don't like paying fuel duty as much as the next guy but I'm also a realist. Listening to a couple of pi$$ed off truckers basing their views on what they've read in the Sun and Star isn't the way you form a taxation policy but if they want to start a debate, they have to be prepared to address the less convenient issues.

Lum

Road tax alone (another unfair tax, that penalises car ownership rather than car use) pays for the entire road infrastructure several times over so the argument about fuel tax paying for the road use doesn't hold water.

It's also another one that annoys the truckers since the foreigners don't have to pay road tax, thus putting them at a competitive advantage (along with their ability to fill up with cheap French diesel before they get on the ferry), while they still have to pay French road tolls.

I'd support getting rid of all the stealth taxes accompanied by a big rise in income tax. Then the actual cost of running this country would be out in the open. Done right it could work since while your take home pay would be lower you wouldn't be shelling out so much on fuel, or car insurance, or groceries (both due to reduced transport costs and due to no VAT)

The downside of this is that the public would be able to see how much it really costs to run this country, how inefficient and useless most of the public services really are and they would demand change. Therefore no government is ever going to do it.

At least we'd save some money by being able to downsize the Inland Revenue since only the income tax collecting department would need to exist.

whatmichaelsays

Lum wrote: »

Road tax alone (another unfair tax, that penalises car ownership rather than car use) pays for the entire road infrastructure several times over so the argument about fuel tax paying for the road use doesn't hold water.

Road tax (VED) doesn't go towards road infrastructure. It just goes towards general tax revenue

It's also another one that annoys the truckers since the foreigners don't have to pay road tax, thus putting them at a competitive advantage (along with their ability to fill up with cheap French diesel before they get on the ferry), while they still have to pay French road tolls.

Personally, I've never found fuel to be THAT much cheaper on the continent. Another aspect that the Road Haulage Association also conveniently forgets in its anti fuel duty rant is that the French and Belgians, whilst having lower rated of fuel duty, have considerably higher business tax rates. Unsurprisingly, not once has the RHA suggested increasing their business rates in return for lower fuel duty.

I'd support getting rid of all the stealth taxes accompanied by a big rise in income tax. Then the actual cost of running this country would be out in the open. Done right it could work since while your take home pay would be lower you wouldn't be shelling out so much on fuel, or car insurance, or groceries (both due to reduced transport costs and due to no VAT)

The downside of this is that the public would be able to see how much it really costs to run this country, how inefficient and useless most of the public services really are and they would demand change. Therefore no government is ever going to do it.

At least we'd save some money by being able to downsize the Inland Revenue since only the income tax collecting department would need to exist.

Part of me agrees with that and part of it doesn't. Firstly, what measures would there be to force retailers to pass on such cuts? You are also targeting those on lower incomes - a PAYE increase to somebody on a low income, without a car, is probably going to make them worse off. They certainly won't reap the benefits that a high earner driving 30k miles a year would reap.

And of course, scaling back public services puts greater strain on the benefits system. I'd agree in some respects that the public sector wastes money (although just because you don't agree with a scheme, doesn't mean that it isn't right) but in all the current political posturing over who will cut more, there is a human and economical cost to consider.

Lum

whatmichaelsays wrote: »

Road tax (VED) doesn't go towards road infrastructure. It just goes towards general tax revenue

I'm well aware of this, it's the same with the fuel duty. The point is that the argument for high fuel tax to pay for the roads is invalid as drivers pay for that many many times over already.

Part of me agrees with that and part of it doesn't. Firstly, what measures would there be to force retailers to pass on such cuts? You are also targeting those on lower incomes - a PAYE increase to somebody on a low income, without a car, is probably going to make them worse off. They certainly won't reap the benefits that a high earner driving 30k miles a year would reap.

That depends on how the raise in implemented. If you were to move the 40% threshold down, or bring in a new 50% or 60% threshold that wouldn't penalise the poor so much.

The people who suffer currently are the medium and low earners doing huge mileage. The 40% tax bracket is a far away dream for someone like me. My GF earns significantly more but because of fuel costs has less disposable income. I ended up paying for her LPG conversion at a cost of about £1800 because we worked out the ROI to be something like 6 months, purely because of the difference in taxation.

What I'm trying to highlight though is the sheer amount of pi$$ taking that goes on with fuel tax. If you import goods from abroad, you get taxed at around 40%, 20% duty then 17.5% VAT on top of the total including duty). Not sure what the current fate on fags and booze are but I think they're at around 60%. These are completely non essential items and come with a significant increase in NHS costs due to cancer and voilence. However fuel, stuff people need to actually get to work rather than sitting at home on the dole is taxed at 300%. Can't you see how it's a bit ridiculous.

And of course, scaling back public services puts greater strain on the benefits system. I'd agree in some respects that the public sector wastes money (although just because you don't agree with a scheme, doesn't mean that it isn't right) but in all the current political posturing over who will cut more, there is a human and economical cost to consider.

Oh I have no problem with most of the schemes out there (well maybe some quangos ought to go) my problem is with just the wasteful way that they are run. A civil service job is generally seen as an easy, cushy, option for people with no ambition or real skill, and that is almost impossible to get sacked from. From my experience working for a supplier to the civil service, with most of my time spent on customer sites the sheer number of incompetent wasters that work there (I'm talking backoffice here, the front line staff have nothing on the backoffice staff when it comes to being incompetent, rude, unhelpful jobsworths) is staggering. If I worked in IT there I could probably replace a quarter of the staff in any given department with a very small shell script, and if it were legal to sack people for being useless at their job, I could get rid of another half of them without any detriment to the performance of the department.

Sure we'd still pick up the bill in terms of dole money since a lot of these people would be completely unemployable in the private sector, but it'd be cheaper than paying them to waste desk space in a huge council office somewhere. Except rising unemployment figures looks bad so governments wont do it.

whatmichaelsays

Lum wrote: »

Not sure what the current fate on fags and booze are but I think they're at around 60%. These are completely non essential items and come with a significant increase in NHS costs due to cancer and voilence. However fuel, stuff people need to actually get to work rather than sitting at home on the dole is taxed at 300%. Can't you see how it's a bit ridiculous.

That point I will agree with you on. I'd quite happily up the tax on fags. Booze to some extent although lets remember that there are plenty of local pubs out there that provide an important social purpose.

Oh I have no problem with most of the schemes out there (well maybe some quangos ought to go) my problem is with just the wasteful way that they are run. A civil service job is generally seen as an easy, cushy, option for people with no ambition or real skill, and that is almost impossible to get sacked from. From my experience working for a supplier to the civil service, with most of my time spent on customer sites the sheer number of incompetent wasters that work there (I'm talking backoffice here, the front line staff have nothing on the backoffice staff when it comes to being incompetent, rude, unhelpful jobsworths) is staggering. If I worked in IT there I could probably replace a quarter of the staff in any given department with a very small shell script, and if it were legal to sack people for being useless at their job, I could get rid of another half of them without any detriment to the performance of the department.

Sure we'd still pick up the bill in terms of dole money since a lot of these people would be completely unemployable in the private sector, but it'd be cheaper than paying them to waste desk space in a huge council office somewhere. Except rising unemployment figures looks bad so governments wont do it.

I'll agree with you in some parts here as well. There are people working in the public sector (I've got family and friends in that boat) doing it either "because it was the easiest option" or because "they didn't know what else to do". I've always been of the believe that public departments should be run to the same constraints that businesses are. There's no reason for public sector workers to travel first class on trains for example or to book a hotel when they are at an event less than 20 miles away from their home.

The public sector will be trimmed back in the next few years, the only question is by how much/ It's not just the cost of their dole money however. Cutting these services also makes people "economically inactive" - consumer spending therefore drops and that has a knock-on effect on everybody else.

Lum

Thing is, the civil servants who travel by first class and book hotels for events are in the tiny minority when it comes to wastage. Most civil servants don't get that sort of privliege.

I'm talking about rank and file staff who take half an hour to do a 5 minute job, who are resistant to any form of change that makes their job faster, either because it means having to learn something new or because it means having to do more work in a day.

Maybe I'm a little biassed because I work in IT and have to provide support for these people, but IMO if you're in a job that, for example, requires you to use a computer as part of your day to day duties, and you end up ringing the helpdesk every other day because you can't figure out how to save your work, you really shouldn't be in that job. But in the civil service all that happens is that management document, approve and distribute a "how to save your work" procedure, and they spent 15 minutes following it, glancing back and forth between paper and screen, and then they phone the helpdesk anyway, if something unexpected like "That file already exists, do you want to overwrite it" appears.

Don't get me wrong, within the civil service I have met an awful lot of honest, normal people and a few people who are very intelligent, skilled and motivated. Most of them usually quit for jobs in the private sector within 6 months though.