Motoring

I must say that there is an argument to be made for doing just that. People cannot avoid having to put petrol or diesel into their vehicles, so there is a common-sense argument that the more that people drive, the more that they pay. The "polluter pays" argument is very important, so that is something that needs to be looked at seriously. However, I object to the fact that this new stealth tax has been introduced on bigger cars and I just do not see the sense in it, other than that it is another stealth tax to raise taxation revenue to pay for the deep hole that the Chancellor has helped to dig in the past 13 years. So we are at the petrol station, as it were, and I see that there will be an Adjournment debate shortly in the House on garages and their valuations, which will determine what rates garage owners have to pay. I hope that the Minister will look carefully at that issue too, because a lot of independent petrol stations out there have been clobbered by the new valuations. That means that either the extra money that they have to pay will be passed on to the customer in the form of higher prices, or we will see a lot more independent petrol stations closing, with the supermarkets filling the void. According to the AA, the average price at the pumps at the moment is £1.12 a litre for petrol and £1.14 a litre for diesel. In April 2008, unleaded petrol retailed at an average price of £1.07 a litre, according to the House of Commons Library. This debate was secured last Wednesday. In last Friday's edition of the Metro newspaper, there was an article that said that, according to the AA:""since the end of November 2008, the burden of fuel duty and VAT on a tank of petrol in Britain has soared by 11.46 per cent compared with 2.23 per cent in Austria. The average rise for ten European countries, including France and Germany, was just over 5 per cent."" Can the Minister please explain how that has come about? Does he think that those price rises are fair or proportionate, or does he perhaps feel that motorists are carrying the jerry can for the Prime Minister's financial ineptitude?