This will kill EV adoption, just to put it into perspective this is the equivalent of an average ICE car (38.6MPG) having 25.5p added per litre of fuel, in a single budget.
The even more ridiculous thing is plug in hybrids are 1.5p per mile, so people with 80+ miles of range in their Golfs etc. will pay half price, even though they are needlessly dragging around an internal combustion engine for 99% of their journeys.
So take the equivalent value off fuel duty and make the 3p per mile charge for all cars. Yes it’s shuffling,but it sends a much clearer message that this change is for all road users.
That would be a much more sensible way to go about it and would also fix the weird plug-in hybrid only paying half price thing. Although it would be a bit weird that less efficient cars would save more when you juggle things around but that’s a one off thing really.
It kinda makes sense though. You contribute to the roads based on milage (and possible vehicle weight) and you pay for polluting depending on how much fuel you use.
One of the big issues with government spending is that they don’t earmark what money is for what, so RR has just seen a deficit in total tax revenue because fuel duty revenue is down and said “EV vehicles are escaping it. They need to pay”. If they had the mental model of “This pays for that” then it would be obvious what would make a fair system.
That I could agree with but you probably need to nearly double the amount.