“Climate change is the single greatest challenge the world is facing today,” said Serge Lourie of Richmond council this week as he announced that he intends to start charging people for their parking permits based on the size of their car engines. Margaret Beckett said something similar a few days earlier. Britain, she claimed, would soon be thrown into “climate chaos” if we didn’t stop flying. She then urged Brussels to get on with taxing every flight we take (by up to £50) to stop this happening.
Both David Cameron and Tony Blair have jumped on the bandwagon too (although it’s fair to say that Cameron got there first). Almost all Cameron’s policies have a green element of some kind and Blair is said to have climate change “at the top of his agenda”.
I’m a natural sceptic, so I feel bound to point out that both Beckett’s and Lourie’s green initiatives have something in common besides do-goodery. Taxes. Lourie says that the point of raising the bill for parking permits is not to raise extra cash, but to encourage people to behave more responsibly. I wonder. His idea is to up the cost of a permit on a Range Rover 4.4V from £100 to £300. But if you can afford to pay £50,000 odd for a car, are you likely to care? I doubt it. You’ll just pay up. So that raises more money.
And the price rises don’t stop with the kind of cars most of us think of as gas guzzlers. A permit for a bog standard Ford Mondeo goes up 30% to £130 and for a Ford Fiesta 1.6 (hardly considered by most of us to be much of a villain of a car) it goes up to £110. The only way to pay the same, or less, appears to be to get an electric car. To me, that makes this not an ‘initiative’, but a tax, and specifically a tax on anyone who needs to transport more than a few people in a car or needs to travel long distances.
Lourie, no doubt, would say that the residents of Richmond should just switch to electric cars, but they don’t come cheap. A new Toyota Prius will set you back around £17,000 (rather more than a new Fiesta), as will a Honda Insight, for which you get a free parking permit. So, under the Richmond scheme, either you pay more to park, or you pay more to get another car. Most people will probably end up just paying more to park (even the maximum increase of £200 being rather less than £17,000). Indeed, I imagine that, assuming it actually happens, green parking permit policy will turn out to be such a good money-making wheeze that all the councils will soon be introducing it. Expensive business, this global warming.
My guess is that it’s just going to go on getting expensive. At the heart of Cameron’s strategy is green taxation. He talks of rebalancing the tax system, taking more money from polluters and less from families. But the big idea (such as it is) appears to be that green taxes are introduced first, then, as the revenues from these start coming in, personal taxes will be cut to stimulate economic growth and overall tax revenues. It is such a good-sounding idea (I say ‘sounding’ because the whole thing is so vague it’s hard to criticise) that I dare say Gordon Brown will be nicking it any day now – just without the cutting personal taxes bit. Best start saving up for that Prius.