For the 14th year in a row, the government continued with their freeze in the inflation-linked fuel duty rise. This policy was originally set out by Norman Lamont in 1993 before being reintroduced by Alastair Darling in 2009 following a brief hiatus in the early 2000s. The Tories’ decision to freeze fuel duty is a short-termist tactic and nothing more than electioneering, giving the government an easy boost in headlines at budget time. This is particularly useful at a time when the polls are predicting electoral annihilation, certain media outlets are trumpeting a mythical war on motorists and conspiracy theorists within the government itself are tied up in imagined fury surrounding 15-minute cities. In a country that is car obsessed, and has been for decades, it’s easy to see that this decision is helpful electorally.
But at the same time it is unbelievably frustrating to see. When Blair and Brown instigated fuel duty cuts in 1999 and then decoupled annual rises from inflation the potential of this important tax was destroyed. The IFS has calculated that, adjusting for inflation, the Treasury loses out on around £19bn a year because of these freezes and cuts. This figure is greater than the total passenger income from both rail and bus travel in the UK , essentially meaning that public transport could have been heavily subsidised or even free. If that’s a step too far in your eyes, then just think of the public transport and active transport infrastructure that could have been invested in over the years.
A tax like this has two major benefits: firstly, revenue generation This one is obvious, as noted above , but secondly it also has huge behaviour modification implications. Human beings can be nudged into doing things a government wants—things as subtle as painting footprints leading to bins can reduce littering. As fuel duty rises and costs get higher, drivers will start to rethink their car ownership. If this came hand-in-hand with better facilities and cheaper public transport this abandonment of cars could accelerate, allowing the country to disavow its ecologically and socially damaging love affair and maybe get on the path to Net Zero.