to pay enough tax/NI over a year to cover the cost of the grant that those who buy a new electric car get:

https://www.gov.uk/plug-in-car-van-grants/overview

5

Seems a good deal 🙄

Seems a good deal

Hey, when I’m scraping the pennies together to spend £110,000 on a Tesla I need all the help I can get.

That’s £5k well spent, helping the most needy, green-thinking, hard-pressed millionaires in the country.

Dianne Abbot costs the taxpayer £75,000 per year.
At least electric vehicles have a use.

And no one buys Teslas anyway. You lease them. At least, that’s what they do in America… My company’s got an office in San Jose and the car park is full of the damn things.

I felt plebby turning up in a hybrid, but it was the only thing the hire company would give me that I fitted in.

The car ones are changing from March anyway. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/plug-in-car-grants-changes-to-grant-level-march-2016

Plug-in hybrids will only get £2500 and have an upper limit of £60k list price to qualify too.

Given how many people in the UK have jobs in the electric car industry (in R&D engineering, etc plus the thousands in Sunderland churning out Leafs for Europe) I’d suggest that kickstarting demand by offering a modest incentive for buying them is probably a good thing.

Thats a very strange way of looking at Tax and grant/incentives… when they introduced the grant the government they didn’t say, “and we will fund this through taxes on minimum wage earners”.

You could say – the corporation tax on Shell and BP will subsidise 228,000 electric vehicles each year. There would at least be some sort of link between “oil producers” and “oil burning substitute”; or that it takes roughly 5 years of one normal motorist (all vehicle related taxes) to subsidise 1 PHEV subsidy…

Would you like to increase the tax/NI rates so that it takes fewer workers to cover the grant ?

I don’t see the connection between the two things.

Yeah it is a strange one. The workers on min wage aren’t paying much for it, it’s businesses and high earners.

Giving incentives to new environmental technology* would seem to be a good idea, no?

* And yes I know all the arguments about the energy comes from burning coal blablabla but a government should (and was I think) be incentivising clean generation too.

How many old grannies have to top up their fuel allowances to pay the FITs on wind turbines which go into hugely wealthy investors pockets?

Thats a very strange way of looking at Tax and grant/incentives… when they introduced the grant the government they didn’t say, “and we will fund this through taxes on minimum wage earners”.

I don’t see the connection between the two things.

There is no connection, just that maybe if they did refer to spend vs tax then people would realise what the Govt is spending THEIR money on.

The information is in the public domain. If they can’t be bothered to find out what it’s spent on that’s their problem.

Surely the correct answer is none, because anyone on minimum wage is already receiving services and support (NHS, roads, etc) well in excess of their gross tax contributions anyway?

Plus of course, a £5000 tax “grant” to the cost of a new electric car, has to be costed against the 20% VAT paid on the purchase of the new car, so in reality, any electric car over 25,000 pre PiCG isn’t receiving any ‘grant’ at all, just a reduction in VAT.

Oh I do love a good whine, what vintage is this?

It isn’t a “good whine” unless the word Banker & Bonus and “you lot have spent my Pension” is brought into the thread.

May I introduce those words to you all.

Rearranging at your leisure, of course…

I must say I wasn’t aware of this. I struggle to see why my taxes should be going to fund someone elses new car, electric or otherwise. grrrrr….

tpbiker – Member

I must say I wasn’t aware of this. I struggle to see why my taxes should be going to fund someone elses new car, electric or otherwise. grrrrr….

Presume you missed the scrappage scheme too then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_scrappage_scheme

tpbiker – Member
I must say I wasn’t aware of this. I struggle to see why my taxes should be going to fund someone elses new car, electric or otherwise. grrrrr….

I agree. Especially since they aren’t nice safe friendly cars that’ll be driven by considerate drivers….half of them appear to be the “usual suspects” i.e. aggressively styled, performance orientated German **** mobiles that’ll be bought and driven by tossers. Possibly.

b r – There is no connection, just that maybe if they did refer to spend vs tax then people would realise what the Govt is spending THEIR money on.

If they did that then the next election would be focussed around who could cut the most services possible. The vast majority of people use only a portion of services provided. People are rightly complaining services are currently being cut, but if you laid it out in the terms you did many things would come out looking very bad, when in an collective basis they are not even 1p per year for an individual.

given that the VAT on a new tesla (say 75k worth) is £15,000 and the import duty is at least another £5k – the total is actually around -11, once you include the ‘grant’..

I struggle to see why my taxes should be going to fund someone elses new car, electric or otherwise. grrrrr….

See point above – If I pay £6,000 in VAT on my new car, and then get a £5,000 Plug in car grant back – how much of your tax has funded my new car?

bikebouy – Member
It isn’t a “good whine” unless the word Banker & Bonus and “you lot have spent my Pension” is brought into the thread.

May I introduce those words to you all.

It’s OK, tpbiker is here, all is complete. Why don’t you move to the US tp?

If they did that then the next election would be focussed around who could cut the most services possible. The vast majority of people use only a portion of services provided. People are rightly complaining services are currently being cut, but if you laid it out in the terms you did many things would come out looking very bad, when in an collective basis they are not even 1p per year for an individual.

Ok, so how many nurses could the NHS employ for the £50m ‘allocated’ to the electric car grant? Upwards of 1000 per year I’d estimate.

Is that better for you?

(Devil’s advocate)

So then we would have 0.25% more nurses instead of helping drive forward technological solutions to the huge issue of overconsumption and climate change.

So then we would have 0.25% more nurses instead of helping drive forward technological solutions to the huge issue of overconsumption and climate change.

Yer, right…

Oh, sorry, hadn’t realised that you were been ironic. 🙄

Considering that the cost of air pollution to the UK was estimated at £8.5 to £20.2 BILLION in 2005 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmenvaud/229/22906.htm (annual inflation would take that to around £27 billion today) and that that figure was calculated excluding NO2, which seems to double the number of deaths due to air pollution when properly accounted for http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/nearly-9500-people-die-each-year-in-london-because-of-air-pollution-study then you could be looking at a cost to the UK of around £50 billion due to air pollution. While I don’t totally agree with how it is being done, subsidising electric cars could potentially save us an awful lot of money.

<troll> How many bankers have to taxed on their massive bonus to fund…oooo, I dunno,…trident?. </troll>

to pay enough tax/NI over a year to cover the cost of the grant that those who buy a new electric car get:

Depends how much they spend on fags and big tellies

Oh, sorry, hadn’t realised that you were been ironic

I clearly labelled my post devil’s advocate, which means that I am making a theoretical counterpoint. If we want to solve climate change, the market isn’t going to do it on its own, so we need public intervention. That’s going to mean spending taxpayer’s money on something, if not this.

You were just being sarcastic though, which doesn’t really help. How about contributing properly to the debate?

Question is, how effective is this kind of policy on buyer behaviour? I suspect its having an effect, it brings some of the cars close enough to the petrol powered equivalents to be worth considering.

I think the lower BiK rates for lower CO2 cars though has had a huge effect.

the solution to pollution and overconsumption is in tax breaks to stimulate the manufacture and sale more cars?

genius….

economy/??k?n?mi/
noun

1.the state of a country or region in terms of the production and consumption
2.careful management of available resources.
3.the cheapest class of air or rail travel.

I think the bigger question here is – are tax payers going to have to bail out Kanye West, now that he’s too big to fail?

how many nurses does it cost to ‘make progress’ towards a trail centre in an area that is a net beneficiary from E.U. money from a tax contributing conurbation in a German car?

the solution to pollution and overconsumption is in tax breaks to stimulate the manufacture and sale more cars?

genius….

You have completely failed to get my point.

My point is nothing to do with cars. It’s about the general principle of state intervention in markets for non commercial reasons.

+1 (no, I’m not suggesting it’s a great idea) – if we want to “solve” climate change then we need to think about stepping away from the economic model which demands continual growth.

We’ve costed it against the taxes paid by minimum wage earners and the amount of nurses it would buy, when the correct comparison is actually how many miles of proper cycling infrastructure you could buy with this money. Of course in reality, as alluded to by iff, it’s just supporting industry rather than trying to do anything real about climate change.

It seems a reasonable sum to offset against moving the source of emissions away from urbanised areas reducing health impacts, lowering noise pollution and pump priming on a new manufacturing basis that is likely to benefit the country both in terms of employment generation and tax incomes.

There will have been a CBA undertaken looking at the benefit against these factors because its required for these kinds of schemes. It’s probably been published as part of passing the schem and if not you should be able to FOI it if you really want to bore yourself with the calculations. You could use it to find the answers yourself, but at a guess its probably cost positive once you consider the health impacts.

the manufacture of more electric cars is of little or negative benefit in the larger scheme of things. And the cars that they replace will almost certainly still be used by somebody else.

Its just a bad use of resources

effective public transport is needed. not the ever increasing reliance on personal transport.

and sure, a CBA can probably be made attractive for anything, regardless of the obvious truth.

I’m more concerned by how many are working on the minimum wage whilst the company they work for, post decent sized profits and pay dividends to share holders, whilst the workers are still having to claim from the state. See far more of those companies on the high street than electric cars.

In fact having now listened to R2 today, it seems that £50m is a massive amount.

Based on the fact that people want us to leave the EU to save £30m…

(Child benefit going abroad)

😉

It depends where you live. I live in a rural area but near a station so hop on a train to work and cycle / walk locally or use the car for a big shop / day out.

I’ve noticed that someone who lives up a very steep hill, about 5 miles from the station has acquired a Twizy for getting up and down said steep hill. Has to be a massive improvement on the standard issue NO2 and particulate spewing farm car / or faux 4WD gleaming tanks which everyone else seems to drive. I’m not a car lover but have to concede that it’s quite difficult to live without them round here, and the plug in things are tail pipe emission free and pretty low CO2 (especially as many of the folk living up the steep hills have wind turbines which seem to be running all the time).