From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Millions of electric car drivers in Britain were spied on by the government through their mobile phones as part of a “bizarre nanny state” plan, it can be revealed.
Customers of O2, as well as other operators including Tesco Mobile, were monitored on the government’s behalf if their mobile internet history and app records showed they visited a site related to electric vehicles (EVs) once a month on at least two occasions.
Department for Transport officials commissioned O2 to spy on 25 million devices as part of a £600,000 study intended to produce a “comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the uptake and usage of electric vehicles”.
At the DfT’s request, O2 trawled people’s web browsing habits, including those of children, to identify “EV users”. This included passengers as well as drivers.
It then tracked those people’s physical movements around the country and sent “anonymised and aggregated” data to the government.
‘Nanny state for motorists’
Details of the project – described as “a surveillance state by stealth” – were revealed this week in a DfT report. The work was conducted by the department under the previous Conservative government and ended before Labour won the 2024 general election.
Full story here.
A bit of a nothing burger of a story. But what struck me was this rather silly graph:
I say silly – but what I really mean is the Title.
Of course pay per mile tax will eventually raise more than fuel duty, when nobody drives petrol/diesels any more!
But what the Telegraph have totally missed is the projection that total tax take from both sources will massively decline – by about two-thirds.
As I pointed out when the pay-per-mile tax was introduced in the November Budget, it will soon have to be increased drastically, if tax revenues are to be maintained. The alternative will be an increase in other taxes.
Fuel duties currently bring in £26 billion a year, so we are looking at an eventual shortage of about £18 billion.
The only real answer is to phase in a tripling of pay-per-mile tax between now and 2030. EV owners need acquainting with real world realities. And it is easier to do that while they still drive petrol, as they will see they are no better or worse off when they go electric.
However, as with everything else this Labour Government does, it will simply ignore the problem and kick it down the road so somebody else gets the blame. After all, Rachel Reeves’ inadequate pay-per-mile tax won’t even start till 2028.
Meanwhile the Telegraph is failing its readers by failing to warn them of the tax bombshell soon to hit them.
