“There has been no direct relationship between vehicle tax and road expenditure since 1937.”
Policy and External Communications Directorate, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, Swansea, August 2009
The DVLA – Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency – now gets it right every time and calls Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) a tax on vehicles, not something that pays for roads.
However, the Driving Standards Agency – like the DVLA, a part of the Department for Transport – doesn’t seem to know the difference and, in the Directgov video below, allows the actresses to call VED, ‘road tax’.
Why is this important? Because far too many motorists believe stumping up for a token annual ‘road tax’ pays for Britain’s road system: the maintenance, the new roads, the bus lanes, the painted white lines laughingly called cycle lanes.
And paying for something confers the right to use that something. So, if cyclists don’t pay ‘road tax’, they have lesser rights to use the roads paid for by motorists; or perhaps no rights at all. This leads to aggression against cyclists from drivers ignorant of their rights and responsibilities.
But if a Government video gets it wrong, what hope motorists?