We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Car website. However, if you would like to, you can change your cookies at any time
The start point for the best source of fleet information |
As Gordon Brown takes over the nation's reins today we look back at the big business car issues that worried his predecessor
Tony Blair stands down as Prime Minister today (June 27) after 10 years in office. But what, from a fleet perspective, is his legacy? Did he cope well with the major car-related problems that cropped up during his tenure? Or can things only get better?
The 'Rip off Britain' campaign was one of Tony Blair's first big challenges, with the Office of Fair Trading referring the motor industry to the monopolies and mergers commission to investigate why UK car prices were so high compared to Continental Europe. Private buyers were seen as the victims, and carmakers and fleet buyers, who enjoyed their big discounts, the villains. During the year or so that it took to run the enquiry UK retail prices did fall, and dealers were finally allowed to buy outright on fleet terms. But not much really changed for fleets, except used market values seriously tumbling amid the uncertainty, and that had a major knock-on for leasing firms who took a mighty financial hit on actual RVs versus predicted ones. Not good. The fuel blockade protests at the pumps that almost ground the country to a halt in the summer of 2000 soon eclipsed those concerns, though, and Blair (and Brown) froze the annual fuel duty escalator and pledged to raise taxes in less obvious ways in the future.
The introduction of a CO2-based company car tax system in 2002 might have been a good attempt to do just that (and change buying behaviour into the bargain) but it actually made up to 250,000 drivers opt out of the system altogether to cash-for-car and employee car ownership (ECO) schemes - a revenue shortfall the Government is still trying to solve. Not even the threat of long-awaited Corporate manslaughter legislation leading to prison for company directors through duty of care negligence can seem to quell the exodus.
Now pretty much every other car-related tax has gone or is going CO2-based, but while the rest of the driving public moan, most UK fleets are pretty well adjusted to the impact and should have lower fuel bills to prove it.
Blair's final big policy of nationwide road pricing could yet be the most controversial of the lot - with more than one million online protesters registering their distaste already - but that's one sticky wicket he won't have to bat through.
What might change with Brown? Given how much of Blair's policy towards business vehicles related to tax, and given the new face at number 10's previous role as Chancellor, it's likely not to be much - not straight away at least.
While the changeover happens, don't expect any resolution on ECO schemes or any other longstanding Government muddle, as at such times civil servants have been known to drag their feet in the expectation that the various agendas will all change anyway as jobs and people reshuffle.
Ultimately, despite some of his tax-raising schemes I don't think Blair was or is anti-car in a way Ken Livingstone has been. And anyway, anyone who - despite his Government's CO2-obssessed policies - is still allegedly looking to buy an armoured Land Rover Discovery 3 cannot be all-bad.
BusinessCar magazine ©2019
Business Car Magazine © 2020 | Business Car is part of NS Media Group.
