TESTER’S NOTES
Matt Prior
Car telematics could tell the government where you’ve driven
Parliament’s Transport Select Committee (TSC) is cross with the Treasury for not returning its calls about road pricing. In February last year, the TSC presented a “substantial” inquiry into road pricing, using four witness panels, 148 evidence submissions and 13 recommendations on how the government could implement it.
Last week, in a fairly brief statement, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt said the government “does not currently have plans to consider road pricing”. The TSC is upset that he isn’t listening, that his department “has not meaningfully engaged with the substance of [the] report” and that if it wanted to be ignored about something so important, it could have stayed home and talked to its teenage children. The TSC’s concern – and this will matter to all of us – is that as drivers migrate to electric cars, there’s going to be a hole in tax revenue that vehicle excise duty and fuel duty currently fill.