EC plans 1992 truck tax targets
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• Europe's Transport Commissioner Karel van Miert has laid down plans for harmonising vehicle excise duty (VED) throughout the Community. The tax is expected to be set at £851 for a 38-tonner from 1992, rising by 558% to £5, 600 by the end of the century.
Van Miert, who received backing from his fellow Commissioners for his proposal at Strasbourg last week, wants to set the tax at 15% of infrastructure costs from 1992, increasing to 20% in 1993 and 25% in 1994.
At present it costs 13 times more to tax a 38-tonner in 13ritaM than it does in Spain — UK hauliers pay up to £3,500, compared with only £350 in France. Eventually, van Miert hopes, road tax will relate exactly to infrastructure costs; in other words, hauliers will pay for what they use, after taking away dery excise duty. Last month van Miert announced that he wanted to harmonise excise duty on fuel to between £136 and £143 per 1,000 litres. The aim is that dery duty will help pay for road maintenance while other taxes will be for fixed costs.
Under his plans for VED, van Miert proposes to let member states pay some of the tax back to hauliers if they are already charged motorway tolls. Operators will probably be able to offset part of their VED bill against the toils they pay throughout the year.
Van Miert admits that his main problem is to get member states to agree on the formula for calculating infrastructure costs which will form the basis of the tax calculations. For this reason, the first taxes will be based on estimates.
UK hauliers will benefit if the proposals are accepted, although their tax bill is unlikely to fall immediately; instead, EC rates will be brought into progressively closer alignment.
Under van Miert's plan the UK will be allowed to retain its relatively high level of road tax, provided it represents at least the fixed percentage costs of highway construction and maintenance. Member states will also be allowed to maintain differences based on truck weights and axle configurations.
Van Miert has left open the question of additional environ ment taxes on road transport, saying that this was a question for Environment Commissioner Carlo Ripa di Meane.
The Freight Transport Association says the proposals "narrow the differences" between UK operators and their Continental competitors, but are not the "total solution".
British costs are higher than most in Europe, says Richard Turner, the FTA's technical services director: "'We should have a level playing field. In an ideal world our taxes should come down, but if we can't get that, they should, at least, be frozen."
The Road Haulage Association says it supports full harmonisation of VED throughout the Community.
Meanwhile, the EC is investing .242m in transport infrastructure throughout the Community this year. One UK route to receive aid will be the A5/A55 North Wales coast road.
Euro MPs are also backing EC Commission plans to end TIR and ATA carnet checks at internal frontiers. Border tailbacks currently cost the Community thousands of millions of ECUs each year.