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New hope on tippermen's tax
Page 8
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• Suggestions of a government climb-clown on its controversial new aggregates' tax have heartened industry leaders who fear the tax could put some tipper operators out of business.
In his pre-Budget report, Chancellor Gordon Brown said that the levy of .£1.60/tonne will Still be introduced in April 2002 to make aggregate prices fully reflect the environmental impact of quarrying.
But Northern Ireland will now be exempt for at least a year and the idea of varying the tax, depending on each quarries' environmental performance, has been scrapped.
The Treasury may also rethink how it deals with waste aggregates which have traditionally been used as in-fill. The fear is that they may be priced out of the market by tax-exempt materials such as mining waste.
Mark McMullan, MD of Boville-McMu liar, which runs five tippers from its quarry in County Antrim, says exemption for Northern Ireland is a relief because of the threat posed by cheaper aggregates from the Irish Republic. "We will still be fighting to get the tax completely removed," he adds.
Robert Durward director of the British Aggregates Association, says: 'The government is now starting to understand that we have not been kidding it in the past two years.
"We still say that there are another 22 problems that have not been looked at. One of the biggest is the problem posed by cheaper foreign imports."