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news
Cyclist and Palace of Westminster (copyright Simon MacMichael)No cycling! (or walking) but Jeremy Hunt’s budget delivers £5 billion giveaway to drivers
Jeremy Hunt has been accused of “just tinkering around the edges” of the changes required to transform the UK’s transport system and benefit those on the lowest incomes, a leading think thank has said, after the Chancellor of the Exchequer opted to keep fuel duty frozen for the 14th year in a row.
As part of the final scheduled Budget before the next general election, Hunt claimed that he would save the average British household £50 a year by opting to once again extend the 5p cut in fuel duty introduced in 2022 as prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Announcing the measure, expected to cost the Treasury around £5bn, the Chancellor said: “The Labour mayor of London wants to punish motorists even more with his ULEZ plans but lots of families and sole traders depend on their car. If I did nothing fuel duty would increase by 13 per cent each month.”
> Rishi Sunak is “on the side” of drivers – What happened to Britain’s “golden age for cycling”?
However, the move has been criticised as a “missed opportunity” by both active travel campaigners and the Institute for Public Policy Research, who have claimed that this latest fuel duty freeze “disproportionately benefits the wealthiest drivers”, while locking those on lower incomes, and those who don’t drive, “into unaffordable transport costs”.
“The Chancellor spoke of helping families in the long term but decided to lock them into unaffordable transport costs,” Maya Singer-Hobbs, a senior research fellow in energy, climate, housing, and infrastructure at the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), said in a statement today.
“Maintaining the fuel duty freeze for another year at a cost of £5bn does nothing to help those who do not drive, who are likely to be on the lowest income, and disproportionately benefits the wealthiest drivers.
“If the average driver is £50 better off at the end of this year as a result of this, the lowest earning motorists see a fraction of this benefit – just £22 according to the Social Market Foundation.”
As noted by the IPPR, new research by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) think tank has revealed that – despite Hunt’s headline of £50 savings for the average household – those who earn the least will save just £22 from this latest fuel duty freeze, while the wealthiest in society will save £60.
“Our own analysis found that drivers on the lowest income are spending more than a fifth of their income on running a car,” Singer-Hobbs continued.
“The fuel duty freeze is just tinkering around the edges of the costs our transport system places on households. It also drives up carbon dioxide emissions and makes meeting our climate commitments even harder.
“This budget has been a missed opportunity to invest in affordable alternatives to driving, despite the huge appetite across the country for investment in public transport and desire from many to travel more actively.”
Despite the widespread desire to travel actively noted by the IPPR, today’s Budget contained no mention of either cycling or walking, a stark omission noted by Cycling UK, and one that’s particularly glaring coming in the wake of last year’s report by the government’s official spending watchdog, which claimed that the Department for Transport is highly unlikely to achieve any of its four key active travel goals by 2025.
“The Government is repeating its long-running mistake of under-funding and short-term thinking on sustainable transport,” Cycling UK’s director of external affairs, Sarah McMonagle said today.
“The National Audit Office (NAO) told the Government last year it wasn’t investing enough to meet its own 2025 targets for walking and cycling, even before it slashed dedicated funding for active travel by two thirds last March.
“This financial black hole, coupled with the stop-start nature of funding, is preventing local authorities from investing in cycling and walking schemes that we know create green jobs, boost economic growth and make our streets safer, in addition to the many health, wellbeing and environmental benefits.
“Instead, the Chancellor has made another short-term focused decision to extend the fuel duty freeze, a poor value for money policy that has been shown to disproportionately benefit the wealthiest in society.
“It’s time the Government took a long-term, integrated approach to transport policy, investing to give people more transport choice, including affordable, safe, and reliable alternatives to driving.”
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
- David9694 1 hour 2 min ago
I hope you're all checking your insurance policies, helmets, test certificates and road tax, it's the 2024 round-up...
- check12 2 hours 42 min ago
200 people out of a close by population of how many? Just build it and stop being a wuss
- Spangly Shiny 4 hours 15 min ago
To paraphrase Field of Dreams, "Build it right and they will come: and use it!"
- Rendel Harris 6 hours 36 min ago
And a Happy Christmas to you, road.cc staff!
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The odds of not being able to find a single pedestrian - just one, note, "any pedestrian" - in an area containing more than about ten of them who...
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They don't make them like they used to
- LongitudeLatitude 11 hours 1 min ago
Thanks for using my picture of chocolate in your opening picture. The original can be found here, chocolate! | LongitudeLatitude | Flickr.
- lesterama 11 hours 28 min ago
Fair comments. I'll put my hands up and say I got the wrong end of the stick with this one. ¡Feliz navidad! Here's a pic for the season of goodwill.
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A trip down memory lane (or street) for me - Harry Quinn's bike shop was at the top of our Street and I used to spend time staring at the bikes and...
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70 comments
You're conflating money with cash. The printed items you refer to are just a physical representation of money, or an IOU for your money.
I know, I only imagine I have any money, in reality I have nothing!
Maybe we could do with better public transport and better infrastructure to make more journeys viable by bike?
Those things would be good but won't make a great deal of difference to many people in many places any time soon. I want the lives of poorer people who rely on their cars made easier asap. Fuel Duty might not be the best tool - it may be possible to provide more help with the same amount of money used in a more targeted way. Of course, the focus on FD is as much about 'optics' as anything.
Longer-term, we should definitely be improving public transport and cycling but our governments tend to be poor at long-term, joined-up thinking - especially when they're in gasping and flailing like this one.
The lack of commitment to cycling is especially frustrating when it can be a cheap, healthy, efficient answer to so many transport questions - but I imagine we're agreed on that.
A lot of people don't use public transport not because of its cost or reliability but because they - the horror! the horror! - don't want to have to sit next to strangers or near to 'the sort of people that they think use public transport'.
I think we already do, but people need to be persuaded to use them for the shorter school run type journeys. Don't forget that just 30% fewer cars on the roads will make the roads we already have much safer for cycling (and put more than a couple of hundred £££s in the pockets of the people and out of the hands of the corrupt tories).
£5 billion giveaway to drivers - yes coz jerk Sunak (un-elected) belated a desperado comment re drivers so he had to deliver..as he won't get back in but is desperately trying to. This country is dying never mind anything to do with a bicycle
Are people that selfish that they fall for this crap?
Yes
Its not C**p if your on minimum or low wages and you like in many area's public transport is a none starter.
Try working shifts and relying on public transport
Then the funds which Mr *unt has suddenly found on his magic money tree should go into improving public transport and/or lowering the tax burden for the lowest paid rather than handing out freebies to those who are already well off. Subsidising fuel is a totally non-targeted measure which benefits the rich just as much as the poor, in fact it benefits the rich rather more because they are likely to use their cars more often and to drive thirstier models.
The analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that benefits for "middle England" - largely focused on NI cuts and chiuld benefit changes for people with salaries of 40k to 80k - are being paid for by the less rich and the very rich.
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/sweet-and-sour-budge...
This is true, but balances against budgets over the last 20 years which have been squeezing the middle earners.
As someone in that middle band, I am not uncomfortable paying more tax to support those earning less than 40k, but definitely not in favour of paying more tax while those earning over 80k do not.
My preferred method for tax cuts would always be to increase the personal allowance, although even this probably favours the higher rate tax payers more.
Did that, driving to my work for more than 15 years, but that's relatively speaking a minority of the cars on the road.
There are lots of people in urban and extra-urban/suburban areas that could use public transport if it was cheap and reliable. Thanks to the Tories repeatedly reducing the money available to councils and reducing bus services in many such areas, including Shropshire, it is unbelievably bad.
Combine that with car-centric planning (which makes it difficult or nigh-on impossible for anyone to use an alternative) and you get even more cars on the road.
There are a huge number of unnecessary or additional journeys that are made simply because there is a car on the driveway/road/pavement and it's oh-so easy to just jump in and drive somewhere.
And why is the annual rise in train fares (3.8% in 2022, 5.9% in 2023, 4.9% in 2024) never mirrored in fuel duty? Because increasing tax on fuel or car ownership in general is considered a vote-loser, plain and simple, and always spun as a negative. The media pander to the idea that car drivers are universally and uniquely "hard-pressed" and are the victims of a fake "war on motorists" despite the fact that driving is subsided to the hilt while everyone else trying to get from A to B has to endure shoddy, dirty and unreliable or non-existent services.
And that's before we get onto the dreadful casualty statistics and the harmful effects of pollution and noise, the cost of car crashes - even those where they just drive into a building [the forum topic is at 2,345 posts to date] - the cost to the economy of congestion, the cost of road maintenance and the ridiculous amount of money spent on new roads or new layouts. And not forgetting the million or so uninsured drivers, a similar number of cars with no MoT, the fact that the vast majority of drivers are selfish enough that they refuse to obey speed limits and are upset when they are caught flouting the law.
"But how will I (activity "requiring" a motor vehicle*) if driving gets more expensive?"
I mean - some people even live in their vehicles...
* Because we build our lives around mass motoring because we can, and because the infrastucture, amenities and housing are so designed, and ultimately because everyone else does. Things that even mildly challenge that will appear existential to some.
Housing designed around cars? Do you live in the Truman Show?
Apart from the wealthier end of the market, most house absolutely don't have enough parking capacity for the explosion in car ownership - before you even consider works vans.
You're quite right. I moved to a fifth floor flat and bought a a truck for each of my 6 kids. Now some of them have partners what am I supposed to do with all the vehicles?
Also have you noticed how garages seem to get smaller every year?
The average '50's house will get a mini in it (garage), anything now, forget it..
Also: they're still building West Craigs on the edge of Edinburgh. Dunno if you'd consider this the "wealthier end of the market" - I'd guess "starter homes" based on a quick visit (but I'm no estate agent)? They tout some "affordable" homes but they weren't built yet so I couldn't check.
For 1,700 new homes there will be a new primary school, nursery, health centre and cafe apparently. Not seeing other shops or other ameneties noted. I wonder how people will do the shopping (couple of minutes by car, 10 - 20 min walk depending on where you are / where they put paths in)?
Seemed pretty much the usual "homes for people with cars" with facilities for same. Just with the odd bonus wider path ("shared use" ...) running through. (They advertise "miles of cycleways & footways being built"). Given the position (outer edge of city, surrounded by effective ring road / arterials I'm betting they will be bought by people who do drive and consider that necessary although there is a station near / bus will go there.
Just next to them - Cammo Meadows, another not-yet-finished development, maybe a bit "wealthier"? But there are even flats - and as far as I can see there were zero cycle parking facilities but ample car parking. (Think that's counter to Edinburgh Council's policies but then these may have changed recently).
Clearly the developers aren't building stuff which they don't think will sell. These people are absolutely going to do the shopping by car, do the school run by car etc. We are still "predicting and providing" and baking in car dependency for the following decades.
And clearly we can't just populate this with the Dutch; we'll just get normal UK folks, who drive. And even if we did those from NL would likely abandon the idea of transport cycling from there once they saw the roads and the "cycle facilities". Only - maybe - like the Dutch - we could have considered site (greenfield) and made more effort with existing infra AND conditions on development beforehand?
But that means I don't have a shit load of concrete, nor am I heating 182m cubed (based on average house sized at 76m with 2.4m ceiling height) of unnecessary space, or do I buy a crap load of furniture, etc. Plus whenever I leave home, I never use the car.... Because it is the car...
My heating bill this winter has been a little over £30.00 and given that there are only around 1500 Passiv Haus build in UK...
I find it strange that some people that live in bricks and mortar could have the arrogance to question my green credentials.
Indeed - and if you don't switch it on either that would be even "better"!
I rather favour this kind of thing - but most people don't. And it turns out that - as far as change is concerned (reversing Maggie's famous quote) - there is such a thing as society - or rather the importance of systems, groups, organisations and "culture" is large.
Anyway that gets us back to "design features of humans" and stuff like "hope and aspiration", "conspicuous consumption" and "what our ancestors called luxuries we call necessities". Definitely above my pay grade (not complaining, that is sufficient for luxuries like bicycles!)
There's always the possibility of building new housing stock to Passive House standards, without paying for the certificate. Probably too expensive for housebuilders that throw up cheap crappy boxes.
It'd be interesting to see how many people have MVHR (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery) installed as a way of improving indoor air quality (personal health) and reducing heating bills.
Yes, only think as far as a car key and themselves
No.
Change the tax rate .... First 40litres at lower rate ... 40 to 50 litres at an intermediate rate and above 50 lites at double the lower rate.
Wouldn't be hard to implement - after all, point of sale kit already copes with multiple tax on shopping.
People would likely partially fill their tanks to avoid the tax. What about applying the duty according to the vehicle? Either manually or automatically (with e,g. ANPR) the reg is entered when you fill up and a using a national database the appropriate duty according to emissions, weight, consumption or whatever criteria is automatically applied.
That's pretty much built in already. Vehicles with higher consumption need more fuel...
Hitting the poorest the hardest again!
The poorest can't afford cars. 50% of households in London don't have access to any motor vehicle.
Question, because I don't know. Is that because they are poor or is it because public transport around London actually works and is affordable so they don't waste money on owning a car?
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