Is London Just Making Up Ways To Tax Vehicles That Need To Drive Inside The City Limits?
Got a cherished car or van that you acquired new, in good faith, in 2015 or slightly earlier? Love its diesel engine that may still achieve 70mpg? Need to drive it inside the 600-plus square miles of Greater London – which includes big chunks of non-London-like counties such as leafy Surrey, Essex and Middlesex, plus the Garden of England that is Kent?
You might be among the nearly 10 million insiders living and driving in this region. Or maybe you’re one of the extra millions of outsiders who have little or no choice but to enter by car or van.
Either way, it’s my duty to warn you that your Euro 5 (2015 or before) diesel vehicles will, from August ’23, be clobbered by a daily, 24/7 fine/tax/highway robbery ‘charge’ of £12.50 (in addition to the £15 congestion charge in central London). This just-invented ‘Expanded Ultra Low Emission Zone’ (ULEZ) racket is heinously undemocratic – not least because millions of ‘outsider’ drivers about to be shafted by it had no say in its already signed-off implementation. This is my idea of injustice.