http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=51126

Time to rev up the monster trucks

And the worst thing is, all those cars get scrapped; they can't even sell them on to recoup some of the money wasted by giving it to people to needlessly buy new cars. Stupid idea. Waste taxpayers' money to 'stimulate' the economy. Daft.

It's an environmental disgrace really, subsidising the scrapping of perfectly serviceable cars in order to keep the car makers in profit and fit to employ people. And some or most of the cash spent at the showrooms will be leaving UK shores and heading for the far east anyway.

We should be building an alternative UK motor industry, one employed in updating, upgrading and maintaining older cars. Would this not employ some of the people involved in car manufacture that would inevitably lose their jobs if demand for new cars droppped? And would it not make more environmental sense?

People who run older cars should be given incentive to continue.

when robots take over , those guys still running their triumph tr5s will be sorted !

…………or MGB's 😉

are they allowed to break them for spares?

utter waste… once again the government have proved themselves to be a bunch of useless cocks

are they allowed to break them for spares?

Nope. All got to be scrapped.

The least they could have done, is saved the serviceable ones and then used them in the Motability scheme, would have saved a lot of money there and be recycling. Or something like that. Converted them for use for police unmarked vehicles, local authority vehicles, all sorts. Just a stupid shortsighted pointless scheme that could have been organised so much more effectively.

And has it resurrected the car industry? Has it? Has it even made any significant difference?

Nope, which means you wont be able to swap engines/boxes etc to keep an old ish car running either!

One of the stupidest things done by the labour government, and its a photo finish between quite a few of their projects.

The milenium dome
Tuition fees
Scrapage

Mr Naranjada, your tickets have arrived.

There are two companies that operate on that airfield – it's the one right next to Bedford Aerodrome, where Palmersport operate (if you've been, the huts on the right of that pic are where they do the Caterhams from).

The two companies do all sorts of car disposal / recycling – from cars written off (via accident, flood damage, etc), knacked old cars taken as part-ex, etc. They certainly got busier when scrappage kicked in, but those areas were busy with cars before – they're not all scrappage and to be destroyed.

New Labia always were a funny bunch- on one hand aiming at the motorist (aka the motoring industry) to reduce car usage, increase taxes, looking at road pricing….

then in the same breath looking to boost car sales…..

oh how fickle, thick and short-sighted politicians can be.

Good to see fred's back to form.

Got a date pencilled in for your next banning yet ? 🙂

In fairness the Dome was originally an idea conceived under a Conservative government. New Labour did waste a load more on making it 'bigger and better' though, that's true.

Mr Naranjada, your tickets have arrived

Hope's the last thing you lose. No cycling or Peaks pun intended there.

they're not all scrappage

Oh, so the picture doesn't fit the caption. How did top gear fail to pick up on that when they broadcast the same image last week (I wonder)

[stops revving monster truck]

some of those cars have to be worth more than 2 grand, I can't understand why people felt the need to get rid of them through that scheme in the first place.

For balance, here's the word from someone that works in the industry:

'Nice cars traded in on scrappage were the exception to the rule – the vast, vast majority that we brought in were absolute rubbish.

The good ones get stripped down and sold to breakers and second-hand parts suppliers, and what is worthless and left over gets crushed.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the government only contributed 1000 of the 2000; the remaining came from a combination of dealer and manufacturer. On a new Prius, for example, the dealer had to find 750 from margin. There were no "Car's worth 3000, lets use scrappage" The only cars that were scrapped were the ones that made financial sense to scrap. For example, if you're buying a Prius and your p/x is worth 1500, we'd rather not scrap it and give 2250 for the car in chop. We'd then trade the car for say 1600 and would come out 100 better off. The customer would be better off and the trader would then sell on and be better off, as would the person who'd buy from the trader.

There was a lot more to it than simply scrapping everything first UK registered before 28 Feb 2000 and were owned for more than 12 months..'

yes but its not just about finances, what about all the minor/traveler/midget/B/TR/etc that might not have been worth £2000 but would stayed on the road for many many years doing a few miles here and there, pauing £150 road tax, being insured, keeping welders in business?

A car might be economicaly beyond saving, but pop allong to any classic car show and see how many people have spent multiples of the cars value restoring them.

All the cars that were handed in as part of the scheme had to go to an authorised End of Life Vehicle recycling company, (or scrap yard as most people would say). This would mean normally that they would be recycled and you could buy the parts. HOWEVER the problem is that all the scrappage cars have come through the main dealers. They have produced a lot of these cars so they need a big scale recycling place to deal with them. Examples of these might be EMR in Bradford. They simply depollute the car and crush it, then it goes off to be melted down and the metal reused.
It's only the smaller scrap yards that keep the cars and sell parts off them. However they can only deal with 1 or two cars at a time so couldn't take the contracts that the big dealers were offering. As a double whammy the auction prices of Cat B/C write offs have risen a lot (due to reduced supply because of scrappage scheme and more Eastern European people coming and buying them to take back home and repair) so they have seen much harder times.
I've seen some cars being crushed at the big sites that the smaller sites could have made a lot of money on and recycled loads (when they are totally stripped the shells go off for melting down and recycling anyway).

Filthy – Member

utter waste… once again the government have proved themselves to be a bunch of useless cocks You missed the word "Labour" out!

Yes, it's too true. The Labour politicians sold us a lie: that all old cars are gross polluters and that new cars are much greener. FAIL!

The energy consumed producing new cars and getting them to the point of sale is vastly more than the possible additional pollution that these older cars might have produced over their modern counterparts.

Then there is the emissions from recycling all these perfectly serviceable scrapped cars.

All this scheme was about was boosting sales (and tax receipts).

Funnily enough, in my experience, this is what ALL green initiatives seem to be about!

The scrappage scheme was indeed in my humble opinion a stupid idea if ever I heard of one. It is totally at odds with Air Quality and environment policies. Work been done at the Institute of Transport Studies at the University of Leeds has been able to pick up an increase in NOx/PM emissions as a direct result of the scheme. Essentially taking a load of older petrol cars off the road and replacing them with a substantial fraction more diesel cars. This is a particularly mad idea from the angle I work on, Air Quality, as we're already failing European legislation limit values for NOx (and PM in places) which leaves us in the early stages of legal preceedings to the tune of £300 million + fines. It's ok though because Labour said those fines would just be passed straight onto Local Authorities "who are responsible". Idiots. So that could be several hundred million coming out of your council tax and local services.

The energy consumed producing new cars and getting them to the point of sale is vastly more than the possible additional pollution that these older cars might have produced over their modern counterparts.

I've heard that so many times but never in reference to any facts, it was blurted out in the same article on TG. What actual information is based on?

Essentially taking a load of older petrol cars off the road and replacing them with a substantial fraction more diesel cars. This is a particularly mad idea from the angle I work on, Air Quality,

But thats something that would have happened in the next year or two anyway, as Diesel cars are in vogue at the moment, with or without scrapage

Oh, so the picture doesn't fit the caption. How did top gear fail to pick up on that when they broadcast the same image last week (I wonder)

It was from a Daily Mail article earlier in the year. link

They're not ones to let the truth get in the way of a good story, are they?

Skidartist, not at that rate. Certainly not if the trends of recent history continued. FYI diesel sales account for ~ 43% of new car sales, and ~ 32% of the current UK passenger car fleet.

I guess my point is that it is just another example of a strategy that doesn't seem particularly well thought through. That statement could have been on loop for around the last 10 years of UK AQ/pollution/climate change policies.

That said figures released not so long ago peg the cost of our poor AQ at between £8.5 and £20.2 BILLION a year and attribute it to an average reduction in life expectancy of 7 – 8 months, which is more than all road traffic accidents and passive smoking combined. So perhaps now it is realised that it is costing a lot of money more notice will be taken by those who make the decisions.

What I mean though is that the scrapage scheme hasn't resulted in more new cars being bought, not any more than normal, it just eleviated the fall in new car sales a bit. People weren't buying diesels because of the scheme they were buying diesels because more commonly than in the past people buying cars like to buy diesels (and there are more diesels on sale to buy). Car sales have kicked up again recently but thats reckoned to be the result of fleet buyers having a splurge after having held off on procurement for a while.

Old cars might have been taken off the market because of the scheme but I reckon (totally spuriously) that old cars don't matter that much in the greater scheme of things. With or without a scrapage scheme you see don't see that many old cars on the road, not because they don't exist but because, broadly, the owners of old cars don't drive an awful lot. Sitting in the rush hour (which I'd suggest is the time when cars that get driven a lot get driven) in my 9 year old, 270,000 mile van I rarely see a car around me that is much more than 5 years old.

The impression I got when the scheme was being run is that when buying through the scheme buyers couldn't get the best deals as the dealers had to contribute. Thus in reality it was maybe only best for those scrapping cars worth less than £1k that benefited from the scheme; is that fair?

IMO it's a shame for the sorts of reasons above but also that young people – or anyone looking for a cheap car not to be used much – would have loved to buy one of these cars.

I'm sure there will be plenty of cheap nails out there – the scrappage scheme only worked for owners of old cheap cars that were in a position to buy brand new ones (with a small incentive), thats not the typical position of an owner of an old cheap car. It won't have hoovered up all, or most, or even a lot of the old cars out there.