Sell Your Diesel Car Now!
You have to worry when councils start to talk about their elevated aims. Just such an occasion was at the 3rd December cabinet meeting. In a paper entitled “Improving air quality and reducing CO2 emissions through parking charges”, Newham set out their plans to fleece motorists.
It was all very noble sounding.
“In support of these twin aims of reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality, Newham's Parking Service has over the last three years introduced policies that are designed to encourage more sustainable transport choices by residents.”
It is very honourable. It is not about fleecing residents, and it is certainly not about finding extra cash to meet the deficit. “I would like to make it clear that the Council does not use parking as a means of generating revenue, as this is strictly prohibited by law. How parking income is used is tightly controlled … and cannot be used to subsidise general expenditure.” This does rather ignore the fact that while parking income cannot be used to subsidise general expenditure, increased charges will make it less necessary to subsidise parking enforcement with general revenue income.
If you can increase your income in department ‘A’, it ceases to be a drain on general resources, meaning that the money in the central fund is freed for other purposes.
For parking administration and enforcement being self-sufficient is not necessarily a bad thing, but dressing it up as a response to the “climate emergency” is a bit of an insult to the residents of Newham.
We would be more convinced if another paper that is going to the December cabinet, (Parking Debt Annual Assessment), didn’t tell us that Newham wants to write off over £12m in unrecoverable parking debts. They are clearly unable to rely upon the projected income because they can’t collect it all.
We don’t think that it is entirely cynical to suggest that parking costs are being increased to make up for the failure to collect the current exorbitant charges.
One by-product of this policy is that the honest residents are being forced to subsidise the dishonest ones. But that doesn’t matter to Mayor Fiaz.
The Diesel Penalty.
Gone are the days when you could try to save the planet by increased fuel efficiency. The proposals are to levy a new set of diesel penalties. This will mean slapping £1 per hour on diesel cars above the standard short-term parking charges. And adding £50 to resident permits if they have a diesel vehicle and £100 pa to business diesel vehicles.
Here is a potentially nasty proposal. The paper suggests “(t)he rationalisation of visitor permits sold in Newham; by replacing the current 6, 12 and 24 hour permits with a 2 hour and one-day visitor permit”. This is fine until you recall that the different RPZs have very different hours of operation. There are those with just two-hours per day (e.g. Canning Town North-five days a week) and those with 14 hours of operation, (e.g. Prince Regent Lane-seven days a week). If you live in the PRL RPZ (and if you have friends or family!) you will be expected to shell out. If you live in the CTN zone, you’re laughing.
Perhaps this is the time to campaign to redesignate some areas.
The second justification for the penalty on diesels is to save lives. This is laudable, if it is true. The report refers to a study by Kings College. “The study concluded that the life-years lost as a result of air pollution is equivalent to 9,416 deaths of people in London, based on typical ages”. This sounds eerily similar to the “study” used by Mayor Khan to justify the imposition of the ULEZ which declared that 4000 lives a year would be saved. Unfortunately, Mayor Khan has been unable to demonstrate that anything like that number have been saved. Actually, he has failed to show a single life being saved.
Saving lives is infinitely more important than what type of car you drive. So why doesn’t Newham (or Mayor Khan) invest in some serious research rather than rely on modelling? It would help if they told us in advance, how many people would live longer and how many people would avoid hospital admissions for instance. But they don’t.
Reducing emissions from diesel vehicles, (as manufacturers have done), may well be a good idea. Getting rid of older diesel busses has made the air a lot cleaner. But we are being sold a narrative masquerading as science.
The bottom line is that this does seem to be a wheeze that councils have discovered for fleecing yet more money from motorists. Remember when the exorbitant price of electric vehicles was off set by the very cheap electricity required to run them? Well, that didn’t last long and on top of this the bottom has dropped out of the second hand electric car market and manufacturers struggle to meet their new-sales quotas.
It seems that fuel surcharging has simply become a convenient way of raising, what is effectively, a new tax.
We suspect that it won’t belong before other councils follow suit. And taxes rarely go down. For some reason they always seem to increase.