At the risk of boring the other contributors to this thread which was originally on toll roads.........
Hi Philmo
The cost of adminstering road tax is pointless - any residual functions of the DVLA could be financed from general taxation as that is where fuel duty goes, or, more simply, from the charges for new licences..
Sorn would be irrelevant. If a car is on the road then ANPR can spot if they have no insurance or MOT. So another irritant would go - quite a few people have been fined as the DVLA have mislaid their SORN notifications. The DVLA mak £4m pa on premium phone lines when people are chasing their documents etc.
Several countries do not have an excise duty licence. I strongly disagree that the paper process provides anything which other checks cannot, and processing all of the reminders, payments, tax disc issues, SORN and so on is a large cost. Reducing the tax charge would do nothing to eliminate this.
Incidentally this would be a huge boost to haulage and coach operators who may often have spare capacity.
As an commercial accountant I am all for simplifying processes and cutting out unnecessary costs and any procedures which do not add value to GB Ltd. We have far too many public employees pushing paper for historic and PC reasons, not to mention the red tape the public and companies suffer as a consequence. Let these employees join the general labour pool to, ultimately, join useful organisations which do add value.
But to come back to the issue of toll roads - there are those who want GPS systems to toll all roads. I believe the reason is that then the huge costs would not look so bad compared with the revenue. But the real issue is that we should not spend the huge costs in any event (much on imports of components) and find other ways of deterring excess vehicle usage.
