I got really angry about his when I heard about it a few weeks ago. The optics of it are terrible.
If you're going to do it, It should be for all car drivers. Fuel duty becomes the extra you pay for polluting everywhere you go.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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So the loophole will be to add tiny internal combustion engines to electric cars to get half price. I wonder whether I could start a specialist conversion business...
For those of us who can't charge at home, who are already paying sky high rates for electricity, this is just another kicking on top of the kicking that we're already getting for the crime of not having big enough houses for charging ports.
Another short-term, non-strategic, ill thought through policy. Yay.
@TIN @manualoverride hmmm. I never like this argument. it implies you bought a car that you couldn't store with the assumption that you could get subsidised (perhaps free) parking on public land?
Don't get me wrong, I feel for you, but "I couldn't afford a plot big enough for a car in my chosen location, and wasn't willing to live somewhere cheaper, but bought a car anyway" is the neutral position people think it is. I'd like an extension but I can't just put a home office on the road outside.
I'm not sure where you're based, but here in the UK about 60% of urban homes don't have off-street parking - much of our housing infrastructure was built before cars were a thing.
The complaint is that without off street parking, there is nowhere to put an EV charger, so you have to use public charging infrastructure. Public charging has higher costs, by about 6x.
If the government really had an aim to reduce UK carbon emission, which is its stated position, then encouraging use of public transport and electric transport would be a strategic choice which this new road tax and the increased tax levels for public charging don't seem to support.
There are many ways in which this could be resolved, none of which are being pursued by this government.
@TIN I'm based in the UK. I agree that parts of this could have been thought through better but I don't think publicly subsidised parking outside homes that were built within walking distance of towns & stations, because that was how you reached towns before cars existed, is neutral or a net good. Those houses become overvalued because people price in cheap parking, meaning people who can't/can't afford to drive are priced out of homes that would suit their lifestyles.
It's a really interesting point and I hadn't thought about street parking as an uncosted benefit before. I suppose the suburban semi with a drive also has street parking, which means that they get the benefit too, it's a public good, but they're only using it for visitors or n+1 cars. No easy solution for that.
The key point I was making though, before we get too distracted by the parking argument, is that for those of us driving electric without home charging it's already very expensive and it would be nice to rebalance that if we're going to move to per mile road pricing.
It is also strange to move just one vehicle fuel type to per mile taxation, rather than all of them.
@TIN I agree with your last point: the per-mile setup should apply to all vehicles according to size and weight if it is truly for road wear. Pollution can then be captured separately according to fuel source. Unfortunately the government has been too toothless to increase fuel duty for years.
Regarding your other point: yes! I think councils should run permit charging like resident parking: if you have a resident permit you can charge in council car parks for £x.
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@TIN meanwhile buses are held up in traffic by drivers living in or near urban centres, and those car owners drive door to door rather than using public transport, reducing the profitability of the public transport and leaving fewer transport options for non-drivers. Meanwhile pedestrians are left with no or narrow pavements because an entire lane of the carriageway, maybe two, is given over to stationary vehicles.
@TIN and high streets suffer because walkable town centres suddenly become a less tempting option for the people who could spend ten minutes walking in, or ten minutes driving *out* to a supermarket they can park at (where again, their parking is "free", ie it is subsidised by shoppers paying more, and not all of those shoppers are drivers)
@TIN and, lastly, if all your roads have cars parked along them then there is no room for safe cycle lanes, which again challenges any efforts towards net zero. Not least for children and teens, as suddenly all their parents have to chauffeur them in cars for every middle-distance urban journey for their entire childhood and adolescence to get them safely to their destinations, rather than letting them get there alone or cycling alongside them in a segregated lane.
@TIN none of this is to say that nobody should be allowed to park near their house; but in general it would do us all good to recognise that parking is *never* free, even if we're not personally paying an upfront fee.
@TIN @manualoverride I wonder if longer term a solution might be for councils to offer resident-permit-charging in public car parks.
It’s not short-term, and it’s not non-strategic. Government has to replace fuel duty revenue.
Strategy: let's stop burning oil which the planet can not afford
Things that support strategy:
- end oil and gas company subsidies
- don't drill for more oil or start fracking
- invest in and promote public transport
- promote EVs for personal transport
You see how this goes? We decide on the macro level aims and then come up with a range of policies which support those goals
That’s nice, but explain how the government would invest in public transport after the loss of £26bn of revenue?
Well, the oil and gas subsidies to private companies that are making record profits currently stands at 18bn, so that makes a big impact in your figure.
I suppose the other thing I'd ask is how much you think climate change is going to cost the UK on an annual basis in pure economic terms
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Where do you park normally? I would expect them to force on street parking and chargers fitted to shared spaces if they were serious about adoption, obviously this charge proves they aren't.
I'm in a first floor flat, I park on the road outside. On street parking would be sensible but as you say, not mandated at present.
Yeah councils tend to block it all too often, extremely annoying
Soneone spare a thought for me, tried not to be car brained and got an electric motorbike.
Massively efficient if you can bear the exposure but that's now going to be charged at 3p/mile too. Problem is, it only costs 0.5p/mile to run so my tax is now 6x what the electric costs :(
Even with a EV car, with 2p per mile home charging, it is a 150% tax. It's like they don't want you be green. Hybrid getting half the tax because they have a dirty engine carried around.
Edit:
To compare:
LitresInGallon * LitreTax / MPG
4.54609 * 52.95 / 38.6
6.2p tax per mile
So double the absolute cost per mile, but wait:
Take cheap petrol of 127.7p per letre
127.7 * 4.54609 / 38.6
15p of fuel per mile
6.2p/15p = 41% tax
Compared to the 150% tax on EV's.
I hadn't thought about it like this, I don't think the Gov would either as they only want to try to get closer to an EV and an ICE being taxed the same per mile. So using your example moving from:
EV = 0.1 pence of tax per mile (5% VAT on the 2p per mile you reference) ICE = 6.2 pence of tax per mile
to
EV = 3.1 pence ICE = 6.2 pence
But should it be absolute or relative? They have gone for absolute, which why it looks so unjust.
I do a thousand miles a month, all on EV, so this is £30 a month tax to me.
How do they even enforce this?
I think you will have to report your millage when you pay your car tax, which was only applied to EVs in April this year.
They really seem to hate EV drivers.
They can get it from the MOT too.
First three years you don't have an mot. I would expect you to have to upload a photo of the odometer, which sounds absolutely awful.
You don't have an MOT, but by year three you'd have a big bill if the numbers don't match.
Bet people try it, or at least pushing off a chunk of it
Motorists will have their mileage checked annually, typically during their MOT as is already the case, or for new cars, around their first and second registration anniversary, the Treasury said.
The tax included in petrol is 53p (plus vat) so twice as much as the number you quoted. What you mean is that EV owners will need to start paying their share for using the roads.
So take the equivalent value off fuel duty and make the 3p per mile charge for all cars. Yes it's shuffling,but it sends a much clearer message that this change is for all road users.
That would be a much more sensible way to go about it and would also fix the weird plug-in hybrid only paying half price thing. Although it would be a bit weird that less efficient cars would save more when you juggle things around but that's a one off thing really.
It kinda makes sense though. You contribute to the roads based on milage (and possible vehicle weight) and you pay for polluting depending on how much fuel you use.
One of the big issues with government spending is that they don't earmark what money is for what, so RR has just seen a deficit in total tax revenue because fuel duty revenue is down and said "EV vehicles are escaping it. They need to pay". If they had the mental model of "This pays for that" then it would be obvious what would make a fair system.
That I could agree with but you probably need to nearly double the amount.
Don't EV users pay tax on the electricity too?
Yes but only 5%
In order to introduce this they needed to apply it to both ICE and EVs equally, to keep the transition to EVs going.
This just encourages people to choose ICE and Hybrid over EVs. If you’re paying public charging prices at a very average 3m/kWh you’re paying 28p per mile. Compared with 13.5p per mile for the average petrol car.
This is making any transition to EVs uncompetitive.
needed to apply it to both ICE and EVs equally,
You mean to drop the fuel duty by 50%, and introduce EV charge in the same time, yes? That would be an equal treatment.
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How is it implemented, practically?
I read on the BBC News site that it will be at the yearly MOT they will gauge how many miles have been done for the year and it will then be charged via the DVLA. They know that people will tamper with the odometers and haven't yet figured out how to handle that situation.
If the EV is driven in the EU, where the UK tax does not apply, how is the UK only mileage reported as it won't add up to the odometer reading? How is this legitimate avoidance handled vs fiddling the odometer?
Yes Plug in hybrids are paying only half but that's on all their mileage (there's no way the Gov would know which of those miles were in electric) .
So my 10yr old phev that does 10 miles EV in winter is then going to be charged for the 200 miles that I then drive on ice (having already paid fuel duty for those miles).
That's clearly unfair, but I don't think the point was "lucky plug-in hybrid drivers" so much as "the whole policy is flawed, look at how they had to shoehorn in hybrids"
True. Having slept on it I've decided im at peace with it, even in my terrible scenario there's a chance we'll do 50% on electric so 50% of what a proper EV pays is OK.
Newer phevs that can do 40-50 miles range and rarely do more clearly win but good luck to them.
I mentioned somewhere else where I'm still irate at is they're saying electric 2 motorbikes will pay the same 3p as an EV car. That's nonsensical, my 100kg moped has no meaningful damage to the road at all yet it's going to represent a 600% increase in my per mile cost
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