Four hundred and five fucking pounds!
For the purposes of comparison, this is the same size and is for the same purpose as the one we have replaced, the tax for which was only £210. I'm not into engines, I wouldn't know a cam belt from a suspender belt, but our vehicle maintenance guys reckon the emissions from this new acquisition are far cleaner, and its operation more economic, than any of our current stock. Yet government is charging us twice as much for the VED.
As environmental policies go, that doesn't make much sense to me.
Fortunately, it is to be used on a new contract we have won with a publicly-funded authority, where the price is set by our vehicle costs plus margin, so we'll just pass the increase in tax back to government via our price per mile.
These vehicles aren't purchased by us by way of choice. There simply isn't any alternative for doing the job which we are paid to do. If we could use a Nissan Micra to do a heavyweight task, the tax would be the very least saving we could gain. So we are being penalised for unavoidably running vehicles with large engines when the only other option is a hugely expensive conversion to LPG or some such (the cost of which will far outweigh the extra road tax).
I'm guessing that the reason this is the first time we have encountered this is that the tax hike is only on vehicles registered after a certain date. In which case, our public sector customers are going to suffer rising transport tenders in the future, which you will eventually see reflected in council or other taxes.
If the client is a private sector company, they will just pass the cost on to their customers. That is, you. Again.
Or we could just keep older vehicles on the road and let Gaia go hang.
It's all just a scam, isn't it?
