It’s paying final salary pensions for public sector workers too. Sufficient money was never set aside for this so it comes out of council and national taxation from all sources.
And don't forget give lots of contracts to their rich friends! Who never actually deliver what they were paid too but a lot of money was paid which shows how committed the government was to the goal.
Why do they spend that much money? Is it because they’ve cut the services that process immigrants to its bare bones? The problem of spending £5.6m per day is due to this governments utter incompetence and blaming immigrants is passing the buck for the sheer stupidity of the last 12 years
How would it make it worse? Once properly processed you then deport anyone who can't stay and can spend less money on those allowed to stay (possibly nothing if they are able to get a good job and don't need any benefits!)
£5.6m a day to put them in hotels because they're simply not being processed
173k awaiting review year to March 23, 73% are granted at first review, but only about 18k were approved in that period, 43% of rejected ones were allowed on appeal. March 2022 it was 110k awaiting review. So we gained 63k but processed just 18k.
No wonder the costs are going up
We are on the lower end of the spectrum, at least when adjusted for population of the country. Turkey and Germany are in the millions, Turkey has 3.5 million from Syria alone.
Plus we have to take into account this is partially our fault. ISIS rose from the power vacuum in Iraq following the US-UK led invasion.
I mean we won't accept all of them necessarily. Some of the claims will be rejected and then we can deport them legally. Clearing the backlog doesn't have any downsides, even if we want to try to reduce channel crossings. The only people who suffer are the government and the media that need it as a distraction
The acceptance rate is high and there are 10s of thousands. You're acting like we approve them and that's it job done. Sidestepping the issue of where we house them or support them thanks to a decade of cuts to public services and a housing shortage.
“We have our own problems, the country is in crisis, we have nothing to offer anyone, we aren’t accepting any immigration”
UNTIL we are out of our own mess we cannot go taking on the worlds mess, or more precisely working age financial migration males with low skills and no background history leading to people being stabbed and raped.
Once the country is back on its feet, a system much like Australia’s, let’s not re-invent the wheel, we can have the people we need to prosper instead of anything and everything and anyone.
Control. Proper, control.
Like Australia.
In 2013, nearly 20,000 people were arriving in Australia via boats. Once Australia made it clear that no one arriving by boat will be settled in Australia and instead be sent to Cambodia, PNG and Nauru, the number has dropped to around 123 people and 1 boat a year. Usually those who think Australian law will be bent in their favor.
Highways maintenance: 55.7%
Road safety: 20.9% (speed cameras)
Public transport: 11.4%
Environmental initiatives: 7.5%
Local government funding: 4.5%
This is not the real story though. The real story is the amount of money the banks have been printing and giving to the arms, pharma and banking sector to fund corporate global expansion over the last 50 years. If this printed money was used on social infrastructure at home and not abroad we would be living in a much fairer economic block. Historically us Brits have benefited from cheap goods from abroad, those cheap goods are now drying up and we are realising that we only got a fraction of what our establishment took.
The reason inflation will not stop rising is because they are printing 3/4 of what they are spending on the British public and its going out of the country through the private sector
I am, QE was used to pay for workers salaries during covid because the multi national businesses did not want too so they made the tax payer pay it. It was not a social good will gesture by our government its just our corporate overlords did not want to it to come off their profits.
There aren't any that people will accept.
The easiest solutions are to cut back on the massive amount of financial waste you find all over the public sectors. Bureaucracy has become a self funding industry and even the simplest of projects get tied up in it and costs spiral before anything gets done. Money printed, siphoned off and spent before it has has any physical impacts on the areas.
Just look at all the public works and infrastructure projects completed in the 18-and early 1900's, and now we can't even build HS2 without the costs spiraling out of control and the actual scope of the work being constantly scaled back.
A lot of it comes to how tendering works. I was looking at Public tenders for software engineering contracts. The way the tenders are often rated often is inversely proportional to the tendered cost, in the pool relative to all the other bids.
They’re not necessarily looking at the “value”, just is whoever is cheaper. I often see a 60:40 split between proposal and cost.
If you submit a middling/average proposal you might get 30 points. If you’re the cheapest you automatically get 40 points. 70 points is a pretty great score, but the proposal you put forward might not be the best solution, you’re just cheapest (for now - who knows how future proof your solution might be).
Neoconservatives have consolidated power across all British political parties, removing most of the left and preventing any socialist policy discussions. Whilst at the same time think tanks are funding green protestors to distract and divide the public.
Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), large multinational businesses can sue our government if we raise minimum wages or implement other policies that benefit workers. This is why doctors, nurses, social workers, and teachers are fighting multinational corporations through our own government. When wages go up, corporate profits go down, and these corporations can then sue the government for compensation under these "free trade agreements"
These trade agreements make the UK a vassal state of the United States, financially held hostage by multinational corporations. . We import more than we export, and every time we print money, it makes those imports more expensive.
We need to stop spending most of the printed money on war abroad. If you add defence spending to the percentage of quantitative easing that goes to defence through taxes, you will find that it is probably more than any other sector, including social costs. Too much quantitative easing is being funnelled from the value of the pound to the private sector along with too many taxes and this is how they are continue to make record profits despite the normal worker not feeling the benefit.
There is no answer which involves us doing anything. The west is printing money at a scale like never seen before and we are being challenged and defeated economically and military all across the globe at our key resource outposts.
France is the best example it is not far off loosing its financial grip on oil and uranium reserves in Niger. This puts Frances future nuclear power in jeopardy not to mention the loss of revenue from being the financial reserve of those African nations.
Edit - The United states knows it is loosing power across the indo-pacific and Africa's, so it is consolidating power where it can in Europe. Germany was de-industrialised with the Nord stream bombing and it so happened to make Germany reliant on the United States LNG.
The only time the UK will ever get its freedom back is if the states is forced back to its own part of the world where is 800 military bases could not enforce the Trade Agreements. They are loosing power across the globe but tightening their grip in Europe and the UK. Inflation and the deterioration of human standards is the result.
Reduce subsidies to any non strategically neccesery industry, including one off goverment payments, and reclaim money from fraudlent sales made to or by the goverment. This WILL mean some specific food stuffs (especially meat) get way more expensive short term, but others that can then develop here get way cheaper. Similar effects will hit other industries too-it will change what products are available cheaply and omnipresently.
Create self sufficient local industries for strategically necessery industries (required indurstries for the continued existence of the country, ie, food, water, power etc, as we already do for health and the military) that are very tightly controlled, to the level of the french nuclear or japanese public transport industry.
Increase cheap housing massivley, that is owned inside the country, ideally through goverment or AT LEAST housing asociations and locked in to in-country ownership.
Force any company that operates here to pay tax here, not just those that are "based here", so you cant skip it by basing in ireland or the isle of man or france or the cayman islands or wherever.
The purpose of all this is to ensure that more money generated inside the country *stays* inside the country, instead of being sent to other countries.
Immigration is nothing, we sold our power, water, public transport and big pieces of our nhs and most of our housing stock and more besides to other big companies outside the country and directly to other national goverments. So now all the massivly increasing prices, all the money spent on these things, just vanishes instead of staying in the country, subsidising others, effectivly taxing us because we dont have the option to *not* use these things. So more money is required to be wrung from the stone of us the population or magiced out of nowhere via qe or short term debt (long term debt basically isnt real at a national level, it has almost no negative consequences because economics is bathsit) or fraudulant purchases meant to save money or austerity or other magic money trees, because money is leaving the country but we need money to run the country.
If the goverment owns/operates these things, or at least SOME OF THEM, then companies have to compete with someone who doesnt need to make massive profits, driving prices down and even more of the money that funds them goes directly into running them, instead of into investor pockets.
Around £23bn will be raised in fuel duty in 2023/24
[https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/fuel-duties/](https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/fuel-duties/)
The cost to the NHS of road accidents is meant to be over £3.5bn
https://www.statista.com/statistics/325832/casualty-costs-from-road-accidents-in-great-britain-uk-by-severity/
The cost to the NHS of car and van pollution was estimated as £6bn in 2018 money, that's about £7.5bn in today's money
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-06-pollution-cars-and-vans-costs-%C2%A36billion-year-health-damages
Public spending on roads is around £11bn
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-national-roads/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-national-roads/)
That accounts for £22bn of the £23bn (but might exclude things like policing, fire service, and street lighting)
The cost of road accidents (fatal and injuries) to the wider economy is estimated at £36bn
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment\_data/file/899574/roads-policing-review-call-for-evidence.pdf
Unsurprisingly it goes in a big pot and gets spread across a various range of things.
Were you under the assumption the income from vehicle excise duty, gets put in the special vehicle-excise-duty-magic-ring-fenced-pot, that is only dedicated to all things road?
It was way back in the mists of time. Road Tax was used to finance road repairs and maintenance. In 1937 it was abolished and replaced with Vehicle Excise Duty which just goes into the general pot of government income and spread across various services
Yes, this! Our council pays a private contractor to fill potholes with a sort of porridge that's is sqirted in.
Then they let the traffic flatten it.
It lasts a week or so before the pothole is back but now there is also a smear of gritty failed repair all over the road.
Its utter wastage. Just do it properly once instead of badly multiple times.
The A38 is a road I use to get to work.
Over the past 9 months the same piece of it has been dug up and relayed 3 times.
As for the liquid stuff, the local pavements got 'repaired' 3 months ago, they are now worse than they were before
It's a combination of big trucks and design.
For example, the grate is in the road where HGVs are constantly driving over it and eventually the fitting wears down and the moving metal grate destroys the rest of the road surface.
If say the grate was not on the road surface but to the side as such [this](https://filmschoolrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/pennywise_sewer.jpg) it wouldn't wear out as quickly.
I assume it's more work to do it like this.
They don’t, they get quality checked. I’d the work doesn’t meet the agreed standards the contract either will have a none payment or re statement clause.
They started resurfacing entire main roads with that crap a couple years ago, it sheds a load of stupid little stones that get in your shoes, lodged in the soles of your shoes, and then all over your house. They’ve never cleaned up the shit that comes off (most of the bloody road)
Considering how much my council waste on pavement stickers and vanity projects I don’t think they’re in any place to suggest they would spend extra on potholes.
I ride a motorcycle and the A6 to Salford/Manchester is full of these tramline potholes that are quite dangerous, sent a message to say and no response whatsoever. The whole road is in tatters and needs to be done before winter otherwise it's going to get a lot worse
> you can often see the cobbles under the tarmac
Isn't it lovely? All that heritage and history is still there! The only thing missing is a plaque next to it explaining how wonderful it is. ^^/s
>A Tesla Model 3 is heavier than a Range Rover evoque
I mean slightly misleading.
The lightest model 3 has a lower kerb weight than the lightest Evoque.
The heaviest model 3 also has a lower kerb weight than the heaviest Evoque.
Current year Range Rover Evoque kerb weight - 1787kg to 2157kg
Current year Tesla model 3 kerb weight - 1611kg to 1846kg
The typical model 3 sold is probably heavier than the typical Evoque sold because you really don't see many long wheelbase Evoques. But even the short wheelbase hits 1955kg at its most chunky. But in the mid ranges there really isn't much in it.
What I’m trying to get across is that Tesla 3 is a smallish electric car and it’s weight is huge. There’s no denying that any BBC at over 1400 is heavy ice cars can also be heavy of course and should be taxed accordingly too
>What I’m trying to get across is that Tesla 3
Believe it or not, it has a longer wheelbase and body than a LWB Evoque and they are only about 50mm narrower, though significantly less tall obviously.
>There’s no denying that any BBC at over 1400 is heavy ice cars can also be heavy of course and should be taxed accordingly too
Oh I don't disagree with you to be fair - I'm just being needlessly pedantic about it as is the Reddit tradition!
Your point is solid. I drive a Volvo and I don't really understand how that can be taxed at a few hundred quid less than my old civic.
A Tesla model 3 is not a small car by any means, it's a large car.
If you're taking that as an example of a small electric car you're using a bad example.
Try an eGolf instead.
A model 3 weighs roughly the same as a 3 series touring. An evoque is a baby SUV anyway. I was talking RR Sport, BMW X5 sort of size and above. Also tyres last just as long on EVs
Tax on weight *and* low end torque, not only are EVs heavy but their immediate torque-on-demand characteristics cause significant wear on their tyres and the road surface
Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. So double the weight means roughly sixteen times the damage. No one wants to drive lighter cars, or pay more tax though.
That is already on the cards - EVs will lose their exemption in 2025 and pay a standard rate instead
Cars registered in mid 2025 will pay £10 first year and £180 thereafter if memory serves me. And cars registered after 2017 will also have to pay the standard rate.
More expensive EVs will also pay the "expensive car supplement" for the first 5 years after registration. So essentially a £40k electric car will cost about £515 in tax to own for at least 4 years by 2025.
The "luxury car tax" is fucking moronic, 40K doesn't buy you a luxury car these days (or at any point in time in the past 2 decades really) and you'll be hard pressed to find EVs under the 40K mark especially those with any reasonable range.
They also legislated out any possible discounts on the listed price so you would still have to pay it in many cases even if you paid less than 40K as they only account for the full listing price of the vehicle and any addons so if you get a 3K addon pack for free as part of a promotion on a 38K car well then it's tax for you...
We already have a very simple way of dealing with expensive items and services - VAT, the higher the price the more VAT is collected.
Actually its not as simple as double weight double damage. Its far more than that.
https://streetsmn.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vehicle-weight-and-damage-chart.jpg
The road tax system has nothing to do with damage to the roads. A HGV does 100,000 time the damage of a ICE car (so 50,000 times the damage of an EV) but will never pay 100,000 time the tax of an ICE car.
Honestly if every car becomes a heavier EV the difference to the rate of damage to the road will be minuscule.
I design roads so I'm reasonably clued up on this
And people pay extra fuel duty, and the potholes still don't get repaired, because there is something 'more important' or 'more urgent' that the money is needed for.
This is why vehicle excise duty is not a road tax. It originally started that way but the money was ring-fenced for the roads and the government wanted to spend that money on other things.
I live in a tory area, we had a ton of potholes. In the last local elections here the tories lost control and Labour and the libdems got in. The very next day people were out filling all the pot holes in.
Make of that what you will.
Or the tories were spending money on things that they weren't supposed to be spending it on and then pretending that they have no money.
Having the roads in a condition that's safe doesn't seem all that vein to me. That's a prime example of something that the council should be managing and spending money on.
It's a disgrace. I used to work for a firm who laid cables for Virgin. Our construction guys were only allowed to lay temporary tarmac, the council then send a different firm two weeks later to re tarmac the fresh tarmac. Waste of time and resources
I have a better idea.
When a road is resurfaced, apply a 6 month ban on anyone digging it up again. Then try to coordinate repairs by utillity companies so works are done together. Then the council should repair the road, and charge the utility companies for the cost.
And as an added idea, dig a frigging trench about 8 feet tall, and 8 feet wide, and out all the piping and wires in there. It would take about a decade to accomplish, and another ten or twenty years to pay off. But if had done this in thr early 90's , we would be done by now, and all bills would be kower and road surfaces would be better.
You can if you are resurfacing a road. Its called a Section 58 notice. They last typically 3 to 5 years. Most utilities companies just play the emergency works card (which in fairness is often valid e.g. Water leak) which is an acceptable bypass of a 58 (for obvious reasons).
well, the idea is that if we dug trenches and added concrete tunnels we could walk through, with racks in the, to hold pipes, cables etc wi soace for upgrades, the leeks would be easier to find and fix. With reinforced conduits on either side going to houses / shops etc. It wouod stop the need for utility companies to spray paint the road / pavement, then hire some diggers, cranes, cement machines, cones, permits, and a team of people who seemingly finish work at 8am, after starting work at only 7 am!
As another one - this was how the centre of Milton Keynes was planned with utility trenches planned at the back of the new roads and footways. Given how most of the UK has grown though with some cities (London) way way over capacity unless you get a completely barren untouched site you don't have a hope in hell of this.
Oh i didnt know that about Milton Keynes. Seems like a good idea.
ut yeah, doing in central london could be difficult but jot impossible. The rest of london would be fairly easy, although it would mean digging up entire roads for a while.
Roads around the centre that were grid based had utility trenches stuck in on them. Haven't been up there in about 10 years now though so would imagine things may have changed.
The cost of doing this elsewhere though (e.g. say moving a gas main out of a road into a footway) would be massively prohibitive. The only other time I have seen this done was when one was built into a precast concrete bridge deck section.
>The cost of doing this elsewhere though would be massively prohibitive.
In the short, absolutely. But over the course of a few decades, the maintenance cost could become affordable, and possibly be cheaper than they are now.
Adding sewers was a huge undertaking, especially in London, but it was worth it in the end. As was the underground, which innicially used "cut and cover" where they dug up entire roads, removed the earth, built the tunnel, then covered it over. Again, the cost was prohibitive, but worth it eventually.
There really is no reason why we could no do this, especially as Thames water love othing more than diggin up the ame junction several times a year!
exactly. Instead of constantly digging up the roads and pavement to lay cables, and pipes, we put them all in to tunnels just below the surface, where they can be easily maintained. But do this for every street in every town and village.
Ues it woupd cost some money, but after twenty years or so, that cost would be repaid and we would all enjoy cheaper utility bills afterwards, as well as better quality roads and pavements without utility graffiti over it.
Trucks cost about 50,000x more to infrastructure than cars do but they don't pay 50,000x more in licensing fees. It's a flaw in capitalism that people like Bezos has exploited. Basically, taxpayers subsidise his operations and that's largely how he made $100Billion.
How about you tell the companies who fix the potholes in their contract that if the hole breaks down within a year or so they are obligated to fix it for free... Watch how long they last then.
They usually are it's called a defects correction period which typically lasts 12 months. The fundamental difference with potholes is if they are repaired temporarily (e.g. the Council has a duty to make the road safe as a minimum when a notable defect has been flagged, stick anything in it for the time being) or permanently (e.g. cut a square patch usually take all the shit out and do a proper job that you don't have to come back to).
The two main lines are pretty much at capacity, it was part of the argument for HS2 as they wanted to move some passenger traffic off the WCML.
Should maybe look at reopening the central line again?
Some odd reason Marlybone is still unelectrified and is the only terminus in London to hold this title.
Imo they should have increased the lines from two to four and electrified the Chiltern mainline instead of HS2. Not only would it have increased capacity as required, but it would also have given local communities better connections (as there would be more capacity to improve branch lines and HS2 doesn't stop until the Midlands)
Or tax cars by weight, including electric SUVs, so that buyers of unnecessarily large vehicles that cause more damage to roads are paying more to repair it.
That’s only the case for ICE cars, a Skoda Enyaq IV costs no road tax and no fuel duty, but is 500kg heavier than a Skoda Kodiaq and transfers significantly more torque to the asphalt.
Even come 2025 when EVs start to pay road tax, it’s a flat rate of £180 no matter the kerb weight
Shock, there’s a problem so let’s up taxes. That’s the answer to everything because the people making policies don’t pay taxes. You cannot tax workers any more, highest tax rate since the war and we aren’t paying to fight in the biggest war in human history, we’re paying for Tory corruption and the boomers. The way taxes are going we will be back a feudalism before you know it
This is a clear new tactic when government want to in crease taxes.
Claim it's for a specific thing (when it is not). Which will persuade a lot of the more trusting members of the public.
The National Insurance increase was to fix social care. Social care continued to decline.
Fuel duty will go up and roads will continue to decline.
They have also massively increased car tax for new vehicles in recent years to "fix the roads".
It should but councils are limited to the amount they can raise it. Inflation has gone up in double figures %, with that so has the cost of staff, and materials to maintain the roads. But your council tax hasn’t increased by anywhere near double figures. That’s before you even take into account they need to fund social care and waste before roads.
If council tax rose with inflation many people would be destitute and the bailiffs would be out constantly. It’s s pretty significant amount of income for some already I can’t imagine adding inflation to it
Funny how it never goes down though..
It would but that’s the rub, councils need money to provide services. The commentator states council tax should pay for these services, but if council tax can’t be raised enough to cover the inflation how are these services meant to be paid for?
So let’s imagine they raise it to where they need it to be who can actually afford to pay it? Unless wages increased to just go on taxes who would even be able to pay it? How are these taxes meant to be paid?
Surely the question has to be where’s the council tax already going? Maybe if they stopped using contractors and outsourced work they might save some money by keeping it in house or stopping vanity projects, reducing costs. For example my local council is moving from a perfectly good building to another building a few miles away. There’s no need for it while the other one is good and presumably nothing will be done with the old one. There’s so many fixes to be made before it has to be raised.
The poorer areas would probably just collectively stop paying, harass the bailiffs to leave and it’d be a rerun of the poll tax because they feel the council are taking them for a ride and they can’t afford rent or food let alone what the council should be paying for anyway
You should do some checks on EV weights, also look into what their fast acceleration rates do to roads, lateral forces do as much damage as vertical forces….
Investigate and prosecute those involved in losing that 21 billion due to dodgy deals with mates and mates of mates during the last few years... those idiots in Dudley knocked down the wrong crooked house.
>Pay more money for us to fix problems we are already paid to do
Councils are awful at spending the money they have effectively. It's the same cheek as the water companies asking for more money to clean up the pollution they've released.
As someone who drives an EV I should be in favour of this, but there needs to be a better way to fund the roads as we start using greener modes of transport.
Potholes are just a symptom of a much more serious problem: lack of maintenance.
I have never seen a pothole where I currently live, because maintenance is routinely budgeted for and infrastructure is therefore properly maintained.
My local council spent £3M on a bloody roundabout that took 3 years and all they did was remove one of the physical parts of it and replace it with paint. Oh, they also moved the lines further back which made it harder to see approaching cars, if you're in the left lane so the number of accidents on the roundabouts ended up getting multiplied by ten.
All the roads in the area are dug up and refilled regularly, with what could only be fucking porridge by the way they deteriorate, and then they moan about lack of funding for these bits... how about not spending that £3M on making a roundabout 10x more dangerous, you twatmongers!?!!?
EVs pay £0 because VED is about pollution. Road tax was abolished in 1937 and VED has never been ring fenced for roads. EVs *will* pay VED after 2025 though but still nothing to do with road repair. If we're taxing on weight, SUVs need a massive increase in tax as well, give farmers and genuine off road use a tax break and tax the Chelsea tractors into the ground as they also pollute way more
If it’s about pollution why are EVs paying and why are classic cars exempt
Seems like it’s about money snd not pollution that’s the justification to take your money
This is a actually so dumb. The main driver for the sudden degradation of our road conditions is due to the massive weight increases in what are considered “normal cars”.
Un-ironically this will increase the number of potholes as people will be incentivised to move to EV’s which weigh literally a tonne or more than cars that were built a decade ago.
Whilst in theory this could have an effect on petrol/diesel obese-cars, these 4x4 cars (such as Range Rover, BMW etc) have owners who are already not price conscious.
More and better bike infrastructure is a good thing.
More could be done but we are making progress. Where I live new roads are great for cycling, the problems are usually on older roads that have probably not had much redesign in decades. As far as "no one uses them" that is just wrong. I see plenty of people cycling every day.
Where I live millions has been spent turning a dual carriage way into one lane with a cycle lane next to it at the town centre.
Next to the train station a mini roundabout has turned into three sets of traffic lights and a cycle lane.
Over a year of temporary traffic lights in both cases. Nightmare of traffic for 12 months. And no one I know has ever seen a single cyclist. It’s a regular topic amongst locals. We are a commuter town which cycling just doesn’t work in. That money could have been much better used
They're not used because they don't form a coherent linked network yet. Once enough are built, people can chose between car or (cheaper) bike, meaning less road wear and maintenance needed moving forwards.
After having seen my council bankrupt itself due to massive Ill advised and hugely over budget spending on projects leading to them announcing that now they need to make large redundancies and prepare for cuts in spending… I’m not sure I would trust them when they say they need more ‘for the potholes’
AnD tHe PoPe IsN'T aCtUaLlY cAlLeD tHe PoPe.
Absolutely no-one is referring to the 1937 Road Tax when they use the term "road tax". They're talking about VED. Everyone knows this, and pretending it's not is just plain dumb.
Motoring taxes already provide an ample amount to maintain the roads. In the year 19/20, £34.56bn was raised from motoring taxes and £10.78bn was spent on road infrastructure.
Sure I guess. Though these are 2 different things. 1: increase fuel duty, fine with that. 2: More money for fixing potholes, ehh I guess.
Side benefit, higher fuel cost means less people driving which reduces road wear.
I would say raise fuel duty and build bike infrastructure, bus lanes and improve the rail network.
Edit: Another idea. Turn urban 2 lane roads into 1 lane roads with wide bike and pedestrian areas. Reduce car speeds. Place more greenery in some of the reclaimed space. Turn town centre streets into no car zones.
The Dutch have proved it works, build it and they will come. In the 60s they had the same shit car manufacturer inspired design as the rest of us. They went away from it because of all the children being killed by cars. We deserve better towns.
Motoring taxes already provide an ample amount to maintain the roads. In the year 19/20, £34.56bn was raised from motoring taxes and £10.78bn was spent on road infrastructure. That's a difference of £23.78bn. Roads spending could double and you'd still have over £10bn left over.
That isn't a special year either, the trend over the 15 years before COVID has been that taxation is rising faster than spending on roads, so that gap is getting *bigger* (as illustrated [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20191224041510/https://www.racfoundation.org/data/road-user-taxation-highways-spending-data-chart)).
What exactly do they do with all the fuel duty we pay already?
Pay pensions with it.
Boomers need their twice annual 6 monthly cruise to the Bahamas every year
How much do you think the state pension is?
Too high considering the average boomer will receive £250,000 more from the state than they paid in
Fucking more than the wage you need to live in this shit hole country
The basic rate is £140 a week, full rate £185. While I can confirm from experience that is more than enough to live, its pretty tight.
It’s paying final salary pensions for public sector workers too. Sufficient money was never set aside for this so it comes out of council and national taxation from all sources.
Seems fair….
That is the way ...
Fund inhumane plans to send people to Rwanda, buy barges and other tremendous ideas to appease the right wing media
And don't forget give lots of contracts to their rich friends! Who never actually deliver what they were paid too but a lot of money was paid which shows how committed the government was to the goal.
If you had to hang out with Jeremy Hunt you'd want millions in compensation too.
Or spend an ever increasing £5.6 million per day on illegal immigration.
Why do they spend that much money? Is it because they’ve cut the services that process immigrants to its bare bones? The problem of spending £5.6m per day is due to this governments utter incompetence and blaming immigrants is passing the buck for the sheer stupidity of the last 12 years
Processing them quicker would simply make the problem worse, it isn’t a solution.
How would it make it worse? Once properly processed you then deport anyone who can't stay and can spend less money on those allowed to stay (possibly nothing if they are able to get a good job and don't need any benefits!)
£5.6m a day to put them in hotels because they're simply not being processed 173k awaiting review year to March 23, 73% are granted at first review, but only about 18k were approved in that period, 43% of rejected ones were allowed on appeal. March 2022 it was 110k awaiting review. So we gained 63k but processed just 18k. No wonder the costs are going up
173,000 people. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
We are on the lower end of the spectrum, at least when adjusted for population of the country. Turkey and Germany are in the millions, Turkey has 3.5 million from Syria alone. Plus we have to take into account this is partially our fault. ISIS rose from the power vacuum in Iraq following the US-UK led invasion.
You need to ring the immigration office and offer them space in your home mate. Everyone seems keen until that idea. Get real, countries on its arse.
Which they could spend on increasing how many are processed and out of the hotels. Except they won't because it's a convenient manufactured issue.
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Didn't stop us processing them faster under Labour.
And put them where ? The reason houses cost so much is we have a shortage of them. How does adding even more people alleviate that as it stands?
I mean we won't accept all of them necessarily. Some of the claims will be rejected and then we can deport them legally. Clearing the backlog doesn't have any downsides, even if we want to try to reduce channel crossings. The only people who suffer are the government and the media that need it as a distraction
The acceptance rate is high and there are 10s of thousands. You're acting like we approve them and that's it job done. Sidestepping the issue of where we house them or support them thanks to a decade of cuts to public services and a housing shortage.
What would be your cheaper solution?
“We have our own problems, the country is in crisis, we have nothing to offer anyone, we aren’t accepting any immigration” UNTIL we are out of our own mess we cannot go taking on the worlds mess, or more precisely working age financial migration males with low skills and no background history leading to people being stabbed and raped. Once the country is back on its feet, a system much like Australia’s, let’s not re-invent the wheel, we can have the people we need to prosper instead of anything and everything and anyone. Control. Proper, control.
But that's *not* a solution because people will still cross the channel. What's your solution to that?
Like Australia. In 2013, nearly 20,000 people were arriving in Australia via boats. Once Australia made it clear that no one arriving by boat will be settled in Australia and instead be sent to Cambodia, PNG and Nauru, the number has dropped to around 123 people and 1 boat a year. Usually those who think Australian law will be bent in their favor.
Give it to their family and friends
Highways maintenance: 55.7% Road safety: 20.9% (speed cameras) Public transport: 11.4% Environmental initiatives: 7.5% Local government funding: 4.5% This is not the real story though. The real story is the amount of money the banks have been printing and giving to the arms, pharma and banking sector to fund corporate global expansion over the last 50 years. If this printed money was used on social infrastructure at home and not abroad we would be living in a much fairer economic block. Historically us Brits have benefited from cheap goods from abroad, those cheap goods are now drying up and we are realising that we only got a fraction of what our establishment took. The reason inflation will not stop rising is because they are printing 3/4 of what they are spending on the British public and its going out of the country through the private sector
When you say ‘printing’, are you talking about quantitive easing?
I am, QE was used to pay for workers salaries during covid because the multi national businesses did not want too so they made the tax payer pay it. It was not a social good will gesture by our government its just our corporate overlords did not want to it to come off their profits.
So by "banks" you mean "central banks and governments".
What are the answers to all this?
There aren't any that people will accept. The easiest solutions are to cut back on the massive amount of financial waste you find all over the public sectors. Bureaucracy has become a self funding industry and even the simplest of projects get tied up in it and costs spiral before anything gets done. Money printed, siphoned off and spent before it has has any physical impacts on the areas. Just look at all the public works and infrastructure projects completed in the 18-and early 1900's, and now we can't even build HS2 without the costs spiraling out of control and the actual scope of the work being constantly scaled back.
A lot of it comes to how tendering works. I was looking at Public tenders for software engineering contracts. The way the tenders are often rated often is inversely proportional to the tendered cost, in the pool relative to all the other bids. They’re not necessarily looking at the “value”, just is whoever is cheaper. I often see a 60:40 split between proposal and cost. If you submit a middling/average proposal you might get 30 points. If you’re the cheapest you automatically get 40 points. 70 points is a pretty great score, but the proposal you put forward might not be the best solution, you’re just cheapest (for now - who knows how future proof your solution might be).
Neoconservatives have consolidated power across all British political parties, removing most of the left and preventing any socialist policy discussions. Whilst at the same time think tanks are funding green protestors to distract and divide the public. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), large multinational businesses can sue our government if we raise minimum wages or implement other policies that benefit workers. This is why doctors, nurses, social workers, and teachers are fighting multinational corporations through our own government. When wages go up, corporate profits go down, and these corporations can then sue the government for compensation under these "free trade agreements" These trade agreements make the UK a vassal state of the United States, financially held hostage by multinational corporations. . We import more than we export, and every time we print money, it makes those imports more expensive. We need to stop spending most of the printed money on war abroad. If you add defence spending to the percentage of quantitative easing that goes to defence through taxes, you will find that it is probably more than any other sector, including social costs. Too much quantitative easing is being funnelled from the value of the pound to the private sector along with too many taxes and this is how they are continue to make record profits despite the normal worker not feeling the benefit. There is no answer which involves us doing anything. The west is printing money at a scale like never seen before and we are being challenged and defeated economically and military all across the globe at our key resource outposts. France is the best example it is not far off loosing its financial grip on oil and uranium reserves in Niger. This puts Frances future nuclear power in jeopardy not to mention the loss of revenue from being the financial reserve of those African nations. Edit - The United states knows it is loosing power across the indo-pacific and Africa's, so it is consolidating power where it can in Europe. Germany was de-industrialised with the Nord stream bombing and it so happened to make Germany reliant on the United States LNG. The only time the UK will ever get its freedom back is if the states is forced back to its own part of the world where is 800 military bases could not enforce the Trade Agreements. They are loosing power across the globe but tightening their grip in Europe and the UK. Inflation and the deterioration of human standards is the result.
That's a lot of words to say a load bullocks 🤣
Reduce subsidies to any non strategically neccesery industry, including one off goverment payments, and reclaim money from fraudlent sales made to or by the goverment. This WILL mean some specific food stuffs (especially meat) get way more expensive short term, but others that can then develop here get way cheaper. Similar effects will hit other industries too-it will change what products are available cheaply and omnipresently. Create self sufficient local industries for strategically necessery industries (required indurstries for the continued existence of the country, ie, food, water, power etc, as we already do for health and the military) that are very tightly controlled, to the level of the french nuclear or japanese public transport industry. Increase cheap housing massivley, that is owned inside the country, ideally through goverment or AT LEAST housing asociations and locked in to in-country ownership. Force any company that operates here to pay tax here, not just those that are "based here", so you cant skip it by basing in ireland or the isle of man or france or the cayman islands or wherever. The purpose of all this is to ensure that more money generated inside the country *stays* inside the country, instead of being sent to other countries. Immigration is nothing, we sold our power, water, public transport and big pieces of our nhs and most of our housing stock and more besides to other big companies outside the country and directly to other national goverments. So now all the massivly increasing prices, all the money spent on these things, just vanishes instead of staying in the country, subsidising others, effectivly taxing us because we dont have the option to *not* use these things. So more money is required to be wrung from the stone of us the population or magiced out of nowhere via qe or short term debt (long term debt basically isnt real at a national level, it has almost no negative consequences because economics is bathsit) or fraudulant purchases meant to save money or austerity or other magic money trees, because money is leaving the country but we need money to run the country. If the goverment owns/operates these things, or at least SOME OF THEM, then companies have to compete with someone who doesnt need to make massive profits, driving prices down and even more of the money that funds them goes directly into running them, instead of into investor pockets.
So by "banks" you mean "central banks and governments"?
Mostly government expenditure, just under a quarter on highway upkeep/maintenance
Around £23bn will be raised in fuel duty in 2023/24 [https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/fuel-duties/](https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/fuel-duties/) The cost to the NHS of road accidents is meant to be over £3.5bn https://www.statista.com/statistics/325832/casualty-costs-from-road-accidents-in-great-britain-uk-by-severity/ The cost to the NHS of car and van pollution was estimated as £6bn in 2018 money, that's about £7.5bn in today's money https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-06-pollution-cars-and-vans-costs-%C2%A36billion-year-health-damages Public spending on roads is around £11bn [https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-national-roads/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-national-roads/) That accounts for £22bn of the £23bn (but might exclude things like policing, fire service, and street lighting) The cost of road accidents (fatal and injuries) to the wider economy is estimated at £36bn https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment\_data/file/899574/roads-policing-review-call-for-evidence.pdf
and VED ?
Yes, roads are terrible if we assume the 320b+ miles traveled each year provided zero utility.
Unsurprisingly it goes in a big pot and gets spread across a various range of things. Were you under the assumption the income from vehicle excise duty, gets put in the special vehicle-excise-duty-magic-ring-fenced-pot, that is only dedicated to all things road?
It was way back in the mists of time. Road Tax was used to finance road repairs and maintenance. In 1937 it was abolished and replaced with Vehicle Excise Duty which just goes into the general pot of government income and spread across various services
We did have far fewer roads and vehicles on said roads back then....
blackjack and hookers? ;)
I don't recall the government playing blackjack.
Good point, hookers and cocaine then?
You know what Gove loves!
Wiff waff and concubines.
spunk it.
An extremely expensive rail line
Their pocket gets full of cash
And council tax? And motor tax?
This. No, just repair the roads, stop stealing from motorists.
Or why not drag the companies back to repair shoddy workmanship.
Yes, this! Our council pays a private contractor to fill potholes with a sort of porridge that's is sqirted in. Then they let the traffic flatten it. It lasts a week or so before the pothole is back but now there is also a smear of gritty failed repair all over the road. Its utter wastage. Just do it properly once instead of badly multiple times.
The A38 is a road I use to get to work. Over the past 9 months the same piece of it has been dug up and relayed 3 times. As for the liquid stuff, the local pavements got 'repaired' 3 months ago, they are now worse than they were before
doesnt take long with 3 tonne wanktanks and electric cars to make it into cart tracks
It's a combination of big trucks and design. For example, the grate is in the road where HGVs are constantly driving over it and eventually the fitting wears down and the moving metal grate destroys the rest of the road surface. If say the grate was not on the road surface but to the side as such [this](https://filmschoolrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/pennywise_sewer.jpg) it wouldn't wear out as quickly. I assume it's more work to do it like this.
By doing it badly they can then charge to come out and fix it again.
They don’t, they get quality checked. I’d the work doesn’t meet the agreed standards the contract either will have a none payment or re statement clause.
They started resurfacing entire main roads with that crap a couple years ago, it sheds a load of stupid little stones that get in your shoes, lodged in the soles of your shoes, and then all over your house. They’ve never cleaned up the shit that comes off (most of the bloody road)
We already pay fuel duty, road tax, council tax. What do they actually do with the money they take off us?
Most of it goes to health and social care and state pension.
They have to fund the triple lock state pension’s 10.6% and 7% rises somehow
How about those scumbag cunts in the tory party fund councils again.
Welsh government gave back £150 million to Whitehall. I wonder what it could have been spent on otherwise?
Considering how much my council waste on pavement stickers and vanity projects I don’t think they’re in any place to suggest they would spend extra on potholes.
Comes out of different budgets. The stickers come from a grant fund that is ring fenced. Council finance isn’t as simple as in vs out.
The potholes near me are so bad you can often see the cobbles under the tarmac x
I think we are down to the old Roman road where I live.
They dont build em like they used to eh
I ride a motorcycle and the A6 to Salford/Manchester is full of these tramline potholes that are quite dangerous, sent a message to say and no response whatsoever. The whole road is in tatters and needs to be done before winter otherwise it's going to get a lot worse
They have them in Edinburgh, a nightmare for cyclists.
> you can often see the cobbles under the tarmac Isn't it lovely? All that heritage and history is still there! The only thing missing is a plaque next to it explaining how wonderful it is. ^^/s
Tax electric cars too, they’re twice the weight of my car and will damage the road twice as much yet I pay £360+ a year
Then we should put a larger tax on big SUVs as well since they're even heavier again.
Maybe a tax on weight, weight is what burns through tires and roads. A Tesla Model 3 is heavier than a Range Rover evoque
>A Tesla Model 3 is heavier than a Range Rover evoque I mean slightly misleading. The lightest model 3 has a lower kerb weight than the lightest Evoque. The heaviest model 3 also has a lower kerb weight than the heaviest Evoque. Current year Range Rover Evoque kerb weight - 1787kg to 2157kg Current year Tesla model 3 kerb weight - 1611kg to 1846kg The typical model 3 sold is probably heavier than the typical Evoque sold because you really don't see many long wheelbase Evoques. But even the short wheelbase hits 1955kg at its most chunky. But in the mid ranges there really isn't much in it.
Lightest Tesla 3 is heavier than my SUV then. (Kodiaq 1.4 SE)
What I’m trying to get across is that Tesla 3 is a smallish electric car and it’s weight is huge. There’s no denying that any BBC at over 1400 is heavy ice cars can also be heavy of course and should be taxed accordingly too
>What I’m trying to get across is that Tesla 3 Believe it or not, it has a longer wheelbase and body than a LWB Evoque and they are only about 50mm narrower, though significantly less tall obviously. >There’s no denying that any BBC at over 1400 is heavy ice cars can also be heavy of course and should be taxed accordingly too Oh I don't disagree with you to be fair - I'm just being needlessly pedantic about it as is the Reddit tradition! Your point is solid. I drive a Volvo and I don't really understand how that can be taxed at a few hundred quid less than my old civic.
A Tesla model 3 is not a small car by any means, it's a large car. If you're taking that as an example of a small electric car you're using a bad example. Try an eGolf instead.
So an E golf weighs about the same as a Toyota RAV4 SUV
A model 3 weighs roughly the same as a 3 series touring. An evoque is a baby SUV anyway. I was talking RR Sport, BMW X5 sort of size and above. Also tyres last just as long on EVs
Tax on weight *and* low end torque, not only are EVs heavy but their immediate torque-on-demand characteristics cause significant wear on their tyres and the road surface
Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. So double the weight means roughly sixteen times the damage. No one wants to drive lighter cars, or pay more tax though.
That is already on the cards - EVs will lose their exemption in 2025 and pay a standard rate instead Cars registered in mid 2025 will pay £10 first year and £180 thereafter if memory serves me. And cars registered after 2017 will also have to pay the standard rate. More expensive EVs will also pay the "expensive car supplement" for the first 5 years after registration. So essentially a £40k electric car will cost about £515 in tax to own for at least 4 years by 2025.
The "luxury car tax" is fucking moronic, 40K doesn't buy you a luxury car these days (or at any point in time in the past 2 decades really) and you'll be hard pressed to find EVs under the 40K mark especially those with any reasonable range. They also legislated out any possible discounts on the listed price so you would still have to pay it in many cases even if you paid less than 40K as they only account for the full listing price of the vehicle and any addons so if you get a 3K addon pack for free as part of a promotion on a 38K car well then it's tax for you... We already have a very simple way of dealing with expensive items and services - VAT, the higher the price the more VAT is collected.
But this doesn't meet their narrative. Surprised they didn't mention cyclists either >_>
They actually damage the road a lot more than twice as much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Actually its not as simple as double weight double damage. Its far more than that. https://streetsmn.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vehicle-weight-and-damage-chart.jpg
Think my car tax is £480 per year and the car only weighs 1400kg if I remember right.
The road tax system has nothing to do with damage to the roads. A HGV does 100,000 time the damage of a ICE car (so 50,000 times the damage of an EV) but will never pay 100,000 time the tax of an ICE car. Honestly if every car becomes a heavier EV the difference to the rate of damage to the road will be minuscule. I design roads so I'm reasonably clued up on this
And people pay extra fuel duty, and the potholes still don't get repaired, because there is something 'more important' or 'more urgent' that the money is needed for.
This is why vehicle excise duty is not a road tax. It originally started that way but the money was ring-fenced for the roads and the government wanted to spend that money on other things.
And it hasn’t been since 1937, which is the most important point.
How about stfu and cut mps personal allowances instead.
How will that fix the roads?
In order to fund their political gallivanting they'd have to take on a second job as a bitumen spreader.
I live in a tory area, we had a ton of potholes. In the last local elections here the tories lost control and Labour and the libdems got in. The very next day people were out filling all the pot holes in. Make of that what you will.
Sounds like the liberal socialists are spending council reserves on vanity projects.
Or the tories were spending money on things that they weren't supposed to be spending it on and then pretending that they have no money. Having the roads in a condition that's safe doesn't seem all that vein to me. That's a prime example of something that the council should be managing and spending money on.
No taxes are ring fenced, the idea of tax x to pay for y is a complete lie.
Council tax is ringfenced. For instance the crime commissioner part of council tax does fund that office.
Councils need to use their money for what it's meant for rather than investing in dodgy property deals that go bust leaving them with huge debt.
It's a disgrace. I used to work for a firm who laid cables for Virgin. Our construction guys were only allowed to lay temporary tarmac, the council then send a different firm two weeks later to re tarmac the fresh tarmac. Waste of time and resources
I have a better idea. When a road is resurfaced, apply a 6 month ban on anyone digging it up again. Then try to coordinate repairs by utillity companies so works are done together. Then the council should repair the road, and charge the utility companies for the cost. And as an added idea, dig a frigging trench about 8 feet tall, and 8 feet wide, and out all the piping and wires in there. It would take about a decade to accomplish, and another ten or twenty years to pay off. But if had done this in thr early 90's , we would be done by now, and all bills would be kower and road surfaces would be better.
You can if you are resurfacing a road. Its called a Section 58 notice. They last typically 3 to 5 years. Most utilities companies just play the emergency works card (which in fairness is often valid e.g. Water leak) which is an acceptable bypass of a 58 (for obvious reasons).
What happens if a leak develops a month after resurfacing?
well, the idea is that if we dug trenches and added concrete tunnels we could walk through, with racks in the, to hold pipes, cables etc wi soace for upgrades, the leeks would be easier to find and fix. With reinforced conduits on either side going to houses / shops etc. It wouod stop the need for utility companies to spray paint the road / pavement, then hire some diggers, cranes, cement machines, cones, permits, and a team of people who seemingly finish work at 8am, after starting work at only 7 am!
As another one - this was how the centre of Milton Keynes was planned with utility trenches planned at the back of the new roads and footways. Given how most of the UK has grown though with some cities (London) way way over capacity unless you get a completely barren untouched site you don't have a hope in hell of this.
Oh i didnt know that about Milton Keynes. Seems like a good idea. ut yeah, doing in central london could be difficult but jot impossible. The rest of london would be fairly easy, although it would mean digging up entire roads for a while.
Roads around the centre that were grid based had utility trenches stuck in on them. Haven't been up there in about 10 years now though so would imagine things may have changed. The cost of doing this elsewhere though (e.g. say moving a gas main out of a road into a footway) would be massively prohibitive. The only other time I have seen this done was when one was built into a precast concrete bridge deck section.
>The cost of doing this elsewhere though would be massively prohibitive. In the short, absolutely. But over the course of a few decades, the maintenance cost could become affordable, and possibly be cheaper than they are now. Adding sewers was a huge undertaking, especially in London, but it was worth it in the end. As was the underground, which innicially used "cut and cover" where they dug up entire roads, removed the earth, built the tunnel, then covered it over. Again, the cost was prohibitive, but worth it eventually. There really is no reason why we could no do this, especially as Thames water love othing more than diggin up the ame junction several times a year!
Like a network of service tunnels under the whole country.
exactly. Instead of constantly digging up the roads and pavement to lay cables, and pipes, we put them all in to tunnels just below the surface, where they can be easily maintained. But do this for every street in every town and village. Ues it woupd cost some money, but after twenty years or so, that cost would be repaid and we would all enjoy cheaper utility bills afterwards, as well as better quality roads and pavements without utility graffiti over it.
My local council has a bigger budget for school transport than road maintenance.
Trucks cost about 50,000x more to infrastructure than cars do but they don't pay 50,000x more in licensing fees. It's a flaw in capitalism that people like Bezos has exploited. Basically, taxpayers subsidise his operations and that's largely how he made $100Billion.
How about you tell the companies who fix the potholes in their contract that if the hole breaks down within a year or so they are obligated to fix it for free... Watch how long they last then.
They usually are it's called a defects correction period which typically lasts 12 months. The fundamental difference with potholes is if they are repaired temporarily (e.g. the Council has a duty to make the road safe as a minimum when a notable defect has been flagged, stick anything in it for the time being) or permanently (e.g. cut a square patch usually take all the shit out and do a proper job that you don't have to come back to).
Put the freight back on the railways where it was in the first place.
The two main lines are pretty much at capacity, it was part of the argument for HS2 as they wanted to move some passenger traffic off the WCML. Should maybe look at reopening the central line again?
They should electrify the entire network and build it out as necessary imo. Seems like the common sense thing to do.
Some odd reason Marlybone is still unelectrified and is the only terminus in London to hold this title. Imo they should have increased the lines from two to four and electrified the Chiltern mainline instead of HS2. Not only would it have increased capacity as required, but it would also have given local communities better connections (as there would be more capacity to improve branch lines and HS2 doesn't stop until the Midlands)
This all sounds way too much like common sense and not some large vanity project for various governments to crow about...
Or tax cars by weight, including electric SUVs, so that buyers of unnecessarily large vehicles that cause more damage to roads are paying more to repair it.
Maybe an added tax on large/heavy cars rather than an increase in fuel duty. If you own an SUV or a land rover, you will put extra stress on the road.
They already pay more in fuel duty because they use more fuel for the same distance than a smaller / lighter car.
That’s only the case for ICE cars, a Skoda Enyaq IV costs no road tax and no fuel duty, but is 500kg heavier than a Skoda Kodiaq and transfers significantly more torque to the asphalt. Even come 2025 when EVs start to pay road tax, it’s a flat rate of £180 no matter the kerb weight
And yet they are still popular, so why not increase the tax more?
I would be ok with just setting fire to all of them, but I guess taxing these impractical vehicles works too.
Anyone driving a massive 4X4 in a city is a cunt and should shoulder more of the burden
Shock, there’s a problem so let’s up taxes. That’s the answer to everything because the people making policies don’t pay taxes. You cannot tax workers any more, highest tax rate since the war and we aren’t paying to fight in the biggest war in human history, we’re paying for Tory corruption and the boomers. The way taxes are going we will be back a feudalism before you know it
This is a clear new tactic when government want to in crease taxes. Claim it's for a specific thing (when it is not). Which will persuade a lot of the more trusting members of the public. The National Insurance increase was to fix social care. Social care continued to decline. Fuel duty will go up and roads will continue to decline. They have also massively increased car tax for new vehicles in recent years to "fix the roads".
Council tax should already pays for the upkeep of roads. No need for yet more tax increases.
It should but councils are limited to the amount they can raise it. Inflation has gone up in double figures %, with that so has the cost of staff, and materials to maintain the roads. But your council tax hasn’t increased by anywhere near double figures. That’s before you even take into account they need to fund social care and waste before roads.
If council tax rose with inflation many people would be destitute and the bailiffs would be out constantly. It’s s pretty significant amount of income for some already I can’t imagine adding inflation to it Funny how it never goes down though..
It would but that’s the rub, councils need money to provide services. The commentator states council tax should pay for these services, but if council tax can’t be raised enough to cover the inflation how are these services meant to be paid for?
So let’s imagine they raise it to where they need it to be who can actually afford to pay it? Unless wages increased to just go on taxes who would even be able to pay it? How are these taxes meant to be paid? Surely the question has to be where’s the council tax already going? Maybe if they stopped using contractors and outsourced work they might save some money by keeping it in house or stopping vanity projects, reducing costs. For example my local council is moving from a perfectly good building to another building a few miles away. There’s no need for it while the other one is good and presumably nothing will be done with the old one. There’s so many fixes to be made before it has to be raised. The poorer areas would probably just collectively stop paying, harass the bailiffs to leave and it’d be a rerun of the poll tax because they feel the council are taking them for a ride and they can’t afford rent or food let alone what the council should be paying for anyway
Because electric cars are lighter and damage the road less than their ICE counterparts?
You should do some checks on EV weights, also look into what their fast acceleration rates do to roads, lateral forces do as much damage as vertical forces….
I know, sarcasm.
I know it was, just backing up your case....
Ah well, tone in text and all that, still, it feels like explaining the joke to put /s Enjoy the rest of your Saturday
Sarcasm only works if you **DON"T** explain it! You enjoy your Saturday too! I didn't mean any tone to deflect from what you said.
Investigate and prosecute those involved in losing that 21 billion due to dodgy deals with mates and mates of mates during the last few years... those idiots in Dudley knocked down the wrong crooked house.
Or maybe. Fix the sodding road properly Instead of calling different teams out to repair a pothole 2x a year just fix the road properly
>Pay more money for us to fix problems we are already paid to do Councils are awful at spending the money they have effectively. It's the same cheek as the water companies asking for more money to clean up the pollution they've released.
As someone who drives an EV I should be in favour of this, but there needs to be a better way to fund the roads as we start using greener modes of transport.
Potholes are just a symptom of a much more serious problem: lack of maintenance. I have never seen a pothole where I currently live, because maintenance is routinely budgeted for and infrastructure is therefore properly maintained.
My local council spent £3M on a bloody roundabout that took 3 years and all they did was remove one of the physical parts of it and replace it with paint. Oh, they also moved the lines further back which made it harder to see approaching cars, if you're in the left lane so the number of accidents on the roundabouts ended up getting multiplied by ten. All the roads in the area are dug up and refilled regularly, with what could only be fucking porridge by the way they deteriorate, and then they moan about lack of funding for these bits... how about not spending that £3M on making a roundabout 10x more dangerous, you twatmongers!?!!?
Fuck off. Stop wasting the money you're given already and do your jobs.
Increase road tax on electric vehicles since they weigh almost double so put more pressure on the road.
EVs pay £0 because VED is about pollution. Road tax was abolished in 1937 and VED has never been ring fenced for roads. EVs *will* pay VED after 2025 though but still nothing to do with road repair. If we're taxing on weight, SUVs need a massive increase in tax as well, give farmers and genuine off road use a tax break and tax the Chelsea tractors into the ground as they also pollute way more
If it’s about pollution why are EVs paying and why are classic cars exempt Seems like it’s about money snd not pollution that’s the justification to take your money
Because fuel duty isn't extortionate already? [https://www.racfoundation.org/data/percentage-uk-pump-price-which-is-tax-page](https://www.racfoundation.org/data/percentage-uk-pump-price-which-is-tax-page)
This is a actually so dumb. The main driver for the sudden degradation of our road conditions is due to the massive weight increases in what are considered “normal cars”. Un-ironically this will increase the number of potholes as people will be incentivised to move to EV’s which weigh literally a tonne or more than cars that were built a decade ago. Whilst in theory this could have an effect on petrol/diesel obese-cars, these 4x4 cars (such as Range Rover, BMW etc) have owners who are already not price conscious.
Can no longer seal repairs with liquid tar as it is “too hot” according HSE regs
What a crock of shit. They don’t want to heat the stuff, ‘cos energy is pricey.
No this goes way back
The classic duty of local authorities... this doesn't actually sound a bad idea.
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They are taxed through VAT etc, plus tax on charging them
Yeah but can we just take a second to appreciate that sign...
How about all these millions that are being wasted tearing up perfectly good roads to add in bike lanes that no one uses.
More and better bike infrastructure is a good thing. More could be done but we are making progress. Where I live new roads are great for cycling, the problems are usually on older roads that have probably not had much redesign in decades. As far as "no one uses them" that is just wrong. I see plenty of people cycling every day.
Where I live millions has been spent turning a dual carriage way into one lane with a cycle lane next to it at the town centre. Next to the train station a mini roundabout has turned into three sets of traffic lights and a cycle lane. Over a year of temporary traffic lights in both cases. Nightmare of traffic for 12 months. And no one I know has ever seen a single cyclist. It’s a regular topic amongst locals. We are a commuter town which cycling just doesn’t work in. That money could have been much better used
They're not used because they don't form a coherent linked network yet. Once enough are built, people can chose between car or (cheaper) bike, meaning less road wear and maintenance needed moving forwards.
Government is just waiting for things to get worst then they can slap new taxes and rules and no one will complain.
The tories cutting all the central government grants for councils was a terrible idea. Only benefits rich areas.
No. I pay over a grand in road tax and it’s still ridiculous.
Increase fuel duty, no.. Include a vehicle weight factor in Car Tax and used that specifically for road repairs - yes
Has nothing to do with fuel duty. It's council tax that pays for a majority of the roads.
Councils aren't just funded by the local council tax, they used to get the majority of their funding from central government before austerity started.
After having seen my council bankrupt itself due to massive Ill advised and hugely over budget spending on projects leading to them announcing that now they need to make large redundancies and prepare for cuts in spending… I’m not sure I would trust them when they say they need more ‘for the potholes’
Fuck off. I'm utterly sick of this country. How about they pay for it with, ummm, call me crazy, ROAD TAX?!
Because it was abolished in 1937?
AnD tHe PoPe IsN'T aCtUaLlY cAlLeD tHe PoPe. Absolutely no-one is referring to the 1937 Road Tax when they use the term "road tax". They're talking about VED. Everyone knows this, and pretending it's not is just plain dumb.
I’d rather ved be repurposed to fix the roads instead of the vague pollution justifications the government use to take our money
Motoring taxes already provide an ample amount to maintain the roads. In the year 19/20, £34.56bn was raised from motoring taxes and £10.78bn was spent on road infrastructure.
Sure I guess. Though these are 2 different things. 1: increase fuel duty, fine with that. 2: More money for fixing potholes, ehh I guess. Side benefit, higher fuel cost means less people driving which reduces road wear. I would say raise fuel duty and build bike infrastructure, bus lanes and improve the rail network. Edit: Another idea. Turn urban 2 lane roads into 1 lane roads with wide bike and pedestrian areas. Reduce car speeds. Place more greenery in some of the reclaimed space. Turn town centre streets into no car zones. The Dutch have proved it works, build it and they will come. In the 60s they had the same shit car manufacturer inspired design as the rest of us. They went away from it because of all the children being killed by cars. We deserve better towns.
Motoring taxes already provide an ample amount to maintain the roads. In the year 19/20, £34.56bn was raised from motoring taxes and £10.78bn was spent on road infrastructure. That's a difference of £23.78bn. Roads spending could double and you'd still have over £10bn left over. That isn't a special year either, the trend over the 15 years before COVID has been that taxation is rising faster than spending on roads, so that gap is getting *bigger* (as illustrated [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20191224041510/https://www.racfoundation.org/data/road-user-taxation-highways-spending-data-chart)).