Just as we spent decades arguing in favour of the congestion charge we’ve for a long time been insisting that road pricing is something whose time will come. Simply on the grounds that while road tax and fuel duty are useful enough proxies for what we actually want to tax - to recover the costs of road provision but also that peak usage - advancing technology enables us to actually tax the thing we want to tax - that peak usage and the congestion that results.
So, yes, obviously:
Road pricing may promise a fairer, sustainable way to make polluting drivers pay, ease congestion and fund better transport, but few politicians in power have ever wanted to take the flak that would come with introducing it.
The Treasury has stressed the move from petrol and diesel to electric cars as part of Britain’s net zero strategy will require new sources of revenue to replace billions in lost fuel and vehicle excise duty.
It’s the second part we disagree with though. Replacing lost revenue isn’t the aim. We significantly prefer the option of government simply spending less, interfering in national life less, as a result of having less revenue.
True, this means that there’s always a tension here. There are some things that should be taxed - those third party effects of actions. For by so taxing one makes the economy itself more efficient through the correction of the price system for those externalities. The tension comes when politics meets a cashflow, they never can seem to wean themselves off it once it exists.
As so often there is no answer to this, no solution, only a series of trade offs. Sadly, that’s just what life is, that series of trade offs.
One thing we will insist upon here though. Currently the argument is that, when we include those climate change costs, electric cars will be or even are cheaper than fossil fuel driven. This is something that will not be true once electric vehicles are taxed using road pricing - they’ll go back to being vastly more expensive than petrol or diesel.
As we say, it’s obvious that road pricing will come at some point. But that very insistence is the evidence that EVs aren’t going to be cheaper, isn’t it?