UK motoring laws

There is another one on the site that needs people to sign, the reintroduction of the historic car tax exemption link below

I'd be much more interested if VED was changed from being per vehicle to being per driver. I currently pay a fortune in VED because we have 3 cars and 2 motorbikes. I can only use one of these at a time, so why should I be paying VED on all 5?

While that would benefit me to the tune of one car, I'm not convinced that this form of petition is the best mechanism - it would carry more weight if it were the car clubs I think. (I was bemused when my insurers FJ told me that the same car "was not old enough" at 27 years to be included on my unlimited mileage policy!)

While I sympathise, having 4 currently road-legal cars in the household, there are a number of points in favour of road tax (which I don't think is a fair system even so). At present, it is relatively easy to tell at a glance whether the VED for a car has been paid. If it hasn't, then the car should be subject to SORN and not kept on a public road. Take away the tax disc and you leave the roads open to be littered with all sorts of vehicles with nothing to keep them off it. The main reason for SORNing a car, to most people, is that the car needs some repair work and they don't have the money or time. So those restoration projects and breakdowns could sit by the roadside for months on end, causing an obstruction to all.

Also, car-to-driver ratio. In our house we now have three drivers (one is a learner), so still more cars than we can use at the same time. But how many households, usually with lower income, have just the one car to two, three, or more drivers? So they would be penalised by taxing the driver, even though only one of them can be driving the car at any time.

What about those who have lots of money and can afford lots of cars? They would just have even more. More so, those of moderate income who can afford to buy but not necessarily maintain the cars. At one point I had 14 cars, no more than 4 of which were taxed at any one time. However I could, in theory, afford to buy that many and drive them once a fortnight. The government would only be getting a single VED from me under your suggestion. As they would no doubt get less income this way, the amount each of us would pay would treble, so you wouldn't gain much, and most people would be worse off.

No, the tax disc system is far from perfect, but it's reasonably fair and better than most of the alternatives.

Yes, it's a far from perfect plan - however, I'm sure there is a workable solution meaning you only pay once per vehicle.

I just get very pissed off with hundreds of pounds of VED sitting on my drive doing nothing because we also both have modern daily drivers.

That's the flaw in all proposals and solutions, though - but it doesn't change the fact that the government are robbing us blind by collecting VED on 'hobby' vehicles that only cover a couple of thousand, if not only a few hundred, miles per year.

I don't consider it 'fair' that I stump up £250 / year for vehicles that only get driven / ridden once or twice a month.

The message from Chris Bolus contains these words:

Not necessarily. Replace the tax display with a valid MOT and you have a much better way of keeping unroadworthy cars off the road.

The fairest system for cars would probably be to do a revenue neutral change from tax disk to fuel duty but that might hit Brown where it hurts should the change lead to a reduction in fuel use while the proposed road charging system has more opportunity for Brown to crank up another stealth tax as well as a multitude of profit opportunities for Tony's Cronies (or by then perhaps Brown's Buddies or Cameron's comrades).

Because the government see VED as having absolutly nothing to do with the roads, it is simply another way to raise revenue. If VED/Fuel/Toll revenues were equal to the amount spent on transport then the taxes would be about 30% of thier current level.

Alex