Finance Bill

To the public, this is semantics. Someone who bought a car seven years ago based their decision on how much it cost and whether they could afford to run it. Regardless of how the hon. Gentleman might wish to describe this, to introduce an additional cost seven years down the line—to cars that might be the family run-around, and which those families might be finding difficult to afford to run at all—will be seen by many people as retrospective, because those purchasers did not make the choice at the time to buy a higher-cost-to-run car.