We need to take cars off the road, not subsidise them to sell more

The UK Government has announced a new public subsidy scheme for electric vehicle (EV) cars. Some new EV cars selling for up to £37,000 will fall under a scheme that allows carmakers to claim back a subsidy of £3,750 when the car is sold. A lower bracket of £1,500 subsidy will be available for other models. It will remain to be seen how much of the subsidy is actually passed on to consumers or whether it will be transparently disclosed in the ticket price.

The upfront cost of EV cars (which are often cheaper to run and maintain throughout their lifetime than internal combustion engine (ICE) cars and, of course, car makers and owners do not pay the full cost of the pollution caused by their vehicles) has been cited as a barrier to entry for car owners but a more substantial one - especially in places like rural Scotland - remains the nascent state of the charging network.

Replacing all ICE cars with EV cars will also not improve transport accessibility as it will simply mean that ICE traffic jams are replaced by EV traffic jams of the same length. It also goes without saying that if some people suddenly had £35,000 to spend then they’re more likely to buy a house before they buy a car with it and a 10% discount isn’t likely to change that decision.

A more effective transport strategy - such as the one laid out in our Common Home Plan - would be focused not on boosting car sales (and thus making the GDP line go up) but on improving transport accessibility. It would start with “active travel” - making places more accessible by walking or cycling (£3,750 could allow the Government to give several people an electric bike for no cost to them) and it would make it easier to get to places via bus and other public transport (the £650 million total cost of the subsidy scheme could buy more than 1,200 electric buses).

Community vehicle pools are another way of allowing people who must drive to drive, without clogging the roads with cars (either while driving or while parked). It should be made possible for a community to set up a bay where anyone can rent a bike, car, or even a van, whenever they need one.

The reason why this should happen and why it won’t happen under current government thinking is that these strategies actively reduce the amount of resources being consumed to fill our roads and our cities with vehicles. It’s inefficient and, as we see, leads to massive amounts of public money being taken out of public services and put into the pockets of multinational carmakers. We need to decide what our transport strategy is for. To make it easier for people to get to the places they need to be; or merely to sell more cars?