[jambutty]

Originally Posted by ***Mr D***

I can see you point on Untaxed vehicles, but the fight is still on.

With the new ruling coming to play soon, that any vehicle you own it will have to be insured.
Should reduce the amount of tax dodgers, as they are probably in the same group as those that dont have insurance.

The Petrol Increase I have to argue, how would you judge a Price increase? It would grealy affect UK business who need fule to survive in business, and find it hard enough to compete at the moment.

As for fule providing Third Party Insurance, how would you judge a premium to fuel increase?

I presume you dont do much driving?

So some new ruling is supposed to come into force that says if you own a vehicle it will have to be insured? It may have escaped your notice ***Mr D*** but that is the case now and has been for donkey’s years, except that it pertained to a vehicle on the public highway not just owning one. I cannot see this control freak government going as far as to force people to insure a vehicle just because they own it. In any case if they can’t enforce the current insurance law what chance is there of enforcing this new one?

Well let’s see. The average motorist will do 15,000 miles in a year at an average of 35 mpg with petrol at say £5 per gallon. With road tax at - well there are various prices now - but for the sake of argument let’s say £200 as an average. I don’t know because my car is a Motability lease vehicle and it comes with tax and insurance paid.

So a motorist would use about 450 gallons, spread over the cost of road tax that would be about 45p per gallon. So petrol would have to go up by about 45p a gallon or 10p a litre.

You could do a similar calculation for third party insurance. I’ll let you do that.

With over 2 million un-taxed cars on the road the losses to the treasury are, if we take the average car tax at £200 pa, around £400 million each year. So the increase could come down to just 5p per litre with say 10p for third party insurance.

As you point out most if not all of those 2 million un-taxed cars would not have insurance so if they damage your car your only come back is to sue the driver if he I still alive or pay for the repairs yourself or pay the first whatever it is and lose your no claims bonus and that could be expensive. Even if you successfully sue the driver there is no guarantee that he will pay up. He’s hardly likely to have any spare money if he didn’t insure and tax the car in the first place.

How much driving I do isn’t relevant but if you must know, come next April when I will have had my present car for one year I will probably have managed about 2,000 miles. When I returned my last car in April 2006 it had done 4,500 miles in 3 years and never been faster than 60 mph.

However don’t forget that if petrol were increased to cover the cost of road tax and third party insurance I would be the loser because as I stated earlier my car comes with free tax and insurance.

The government doesn’t like one ‘catch all’ tax because then tax rises will stand out and hit you in the face. But a penny here and tuppence there isn’t quite as noticeable. The more complicated the situation the easier it is to hide sneaky tax rises.