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Finance (No. 2) Bill

Clearly, Inverness would not be a beneficiary. When my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander) made the proposal, he was talking about Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey rather than about Inverness. Road pricing is, I believe, the long-term solution to the problem. We can fix charges for using roads in different parts of the country. For example, my constituents on the Isle of Mull have justifiable cause for complaint when they pay the same tax on fuel and pay more tax to the Treasury because of the higher rate of VAT. They pay more tax in order to drive on potholed single-track roads. It is scandalous that they have to pay more to travel on those roads than others pay to travel on well maintained motorways. Although road pricing is the long-term solution, new clause 4 provides the answer during the interim period before road pricing is introduced. The Office of Fair Trading and other organisations, councils, enterprise companies and so forth have carried out investigations to find out why fuel prices are so high in remote areas. The general reason that always emerges is low turnover. It is argued that Tesco and Asda sometimes sell fuel at a loss in order to encourage people into their supermarkets to buy bars of chocolate and milk at inflated prices, but a small shop or filling station in a remote village or on an island does not have that option. There is a low turnover, but the fixed costs are the same, so the high prices result from that. The only way of bringing prices down is by reducing the element of taxation, which explains why we are proposing new clause 4 today. As we have heard from other Members, EU countries such as Greece, Portugal and France have introduced a similar measure and have obviously found a way of making it work. I see absolutely no reason why it cannot be made to work in Britain as well. If we accepted the new clause, it would allow the Treasury to do some analysis and some arithmetic, to publish consultation documents and to provide impact analysis, which would allow us to decide exactly where the lines on the map should be drawn. I would certainly include all the Scottish islands.