Road tax, by weight: Different ways to ensure polluters pay

Nick Ruxton-Boyle, of air quality specialists Marston Holdings, considers road tax changes, which mean electric vehicles will be liable from 2025, and the need to introduce a fair payment scheme for drivers (and their emissions).

It was recently announced that Electric Vehicles (EVs) will have to pay Vehicle Excise Duty, better known as road tax, by 2025. To date they are exempted to encourage their uptake on the run up to the 2030 date when no petrol or diesel cars will be sold. It has been a success with huge year-on-year increases in sales, a large selection of vehicles available and improving ranges.

The announcement is part of the wide-ranging fiscal plans put in place by the new Chancellor which did not include any changes to fuel duty, which is expected to increase substantially in 2023. Some say that this will slow the uptake of EVs, however road tax is such a small part of the day-to-day, week-to-week running costs of owning and using a vehicle, I do not think this will be the case.

For many years I have watched the EV industry and been amazed by how big the vehicles have got. This is the case for all cars, and a trend in the industry that doesn’t sit well with the current energy efficiency approaches to living we are all putting in place due to the cost-of-living crisis. Regardless of how a car is powered, the bigger and heavier it is the more power it needs to move it, in turn increasing pollution.

EVs are not zero pollution. They may have zero emissions at the exhaust, which is much better than diesel and petrol powered vehicles, but various pollutants are created throughout the manufacturing process. Braking and tyre use generates particulate matter and, for the most, the electricity used to power these vehicles is from burning fossil fuels. Many comparison studies carried out cite different results based on battery life and mileage etcetera. However, it is clear that the smaller the vehicle (engine or battery size) the lower the emissions.

Another big recent announcement is the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in London. It currently covers the area inside the North and South Circular roads, but will be expanded to cover the whole of Greater London in 2023. The environmental benefits of the ULEZ are well reported, including accelerated reductions in most pollutants, and shown to extend the length and breadth of the country, not just the South-East.

I have been working on several projects in the EU recently and have come across the way in which cars are taxed in Denmark. It is fabulously complicated and is based on several metrics including CO2, particulate matter, how efficient the car is, and weight. It was the last one that caught my eye: the heavier the vehicle, the higher the weight tax.

I’m still not 100% sure how the Chancellor is going to tax EVs in the UK, but until we get some political census on a pay-per-mile road user charge (for which polling is softening), I think a punitive weight charge on SUV type vehicles taking over our roads would go a long way to help us move towards smaller, more efficient vehicles, improving our air quality considerably.      

Looking for more like this? Revisit our Big Interview with energy scientist Hugh Helferty, who believes fossil fuel giants should be picking up the cost of carbon sequestration and storage projects by way of a pay-as-you-pollute tax.