Simon Hallows

Inverness

IS Manager

Some aspects of the proposed solution I find attractive. Particularly that it is not London (or large City) centric. Those of us who live and work in rural areas are penalised with the blanket tax rate applied to fuel. You could put the tax up 3 fold and many people would have no choice but to continue paying as public transport just is not an option. You only encourage exodus from the country side of businesses and people. However I think that the proposal is the wrong way to approach this problem. It will be expensive to implement and I suspect a 'jammer' would be very simple to produce. I would propose a scheme where the fuel duty was scaled, higher in the cities and lower in rural locations. Obviously some would make a longer journey to buy fuel but only within reason (people are lazy), and some petrol stations would find themselves a few hundred yards from a rate change. However I would expect stability fairly rapidly (after a few years most fuel stations are redeveloped). A similar scheme could be applied for Road Tax, cars registered to addresses in congested areas would pay a higher rate. City dwellers on a shift pattern (outwith normal transport hours) could be compensated (via their paye?) as otherwise they would be unfairly targeted.