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Road Users (Taxes and Charges)

The period in question was from 1997; I was citing a parliamentary answer, as was the Chair of the Select Committee. To be fair to the Government, however, a previous answer that I have received demonstrates that this trend has been ongoing for 30 years: it is not a new trend that the Government have created, but a long-term trend. I shall talk about fuel duty shortly, when I will be able to reply to the hon. Gentleman in some detail. The Select Committee says in its report:""Fuel duty has proven to be an effective way to reduce CO2 emissions from road vehicles. It influences the amount of fuel purchased, the types of vehicles purchased and, to a lesser extent, mileage driven."" That may be true to some extent, but there are significant downsides to using fuel duty as an environmental tax, and as a surrogate for any other measure. Those problems need to be taken into account if we are to come up with an equitable transport policy that is fair to the motorist and to society as a whole. First, many people have no choice but to use their car. Such a tax is therefore a crude mechanism to force up the price of fuel for people, particularly those in rural areas of Scotland, Wales and England, who have no bus service—or perhaps one bus on a Thursday afternoon, if it turns up—and no railway station, and therefore have to use their cars. An environmental tax, if we are to apply it sensibly, has to secure a change of behaviour. If no such change is possible, it becomes not an environmental tax but a stealth tax that is inequitable for many people. Secondly, fuel is more expensive, by and large, in areas where there is no public transport. It is almost as if a mark-up mechanism is working whereby fuel is kept at a lower price in places where people can switch to public transport. London, in particular, is among the cheapest places to buy fuel. For fuel bought in the highlands—my hon. Friends the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) and for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) recently drew attention to this in an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall—there is a premium of up to 13p to 15p per litre. Pushing up the cost of fuel adversely affects those who are most dependent on it, and have to pay the most for it. A further issue is that we are, of course, in the European Union—we are in a free market in that sense—and there is the opportunity for fuel tourism if we push prices up too far. The Chair of the Select Committee and the Minister will know of the concern among those in the haulage industry about the practice of vehicles loading up vast amounts of fuel before they come into the country, thereby gaining an unfair advantage over our own domestic hauliers.