The Government should act now on petrol and rail fares

 

It's high time the Coalition Government took a serious look outside of Westminster - and now might be a good time to start with petrol prices and rail fares.

The chart below shows the current average £1.28 cost of petrol and where that money goes.

Frankly, it is a shocker. Your pain at the pump sets the tills ringing at the Treasury: where they cash in to the tune of 80.3p every time someone buys one of those astonishingly expensive £1.28 litres of fuel.

(The argument of this is often that petrol is taxed so highly for green reasons. Except to me that doesn't stand up when my shoddy local rail company, First Capital Connect, is allowed to charge £11.90 for a 25 minute off peak journey, as just one example of the great rail rip-off.)

This massive tax grab isn't news. Governments have been hitting motorists and also everyone else, due to the failure to shift freight from road to rail, with this pain for years.

But the issue is back thanks to the rising price of oil - pushed up by speculators you'll be pleased to know.

And so the Government is back to considering its fair fuel stabiliser and not adding yet more duty onto petrol as planned. But rather than simply actually deciding to play fair, it is dithering.

Obviously these things matter less if you are an MP.

After all, if the expenses scandal revealed anything it was that MPs simply do not have to pay for the things you and I do. Chauffeur driven cars, claiming back taxis and rail fares, a taxpayer-covered pad near work, these all help keep an MP's household bills down.

But if I was in the Government I'd be wary. Both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems campaigned with a suggestion of no more ripping off the hard working population and indicated each would bring a return to a fair value Britain. Cuts, it was suggested, would be hard but fair.

Now they are in power, the cuts are translating through to more of what we've suffered for years: higher rail fares, higher petrol prices, higher parking charges and public sector monoliths laying off the low paid while protecting fat cat managers.

It might be time for our PR savvy Government to take a good look at what's going on, because the comment I hear all the time on how they are doing from the man and woman in the street is that this lot are starting to look just like the last lot.

 

- Simon Lambert, assistant editor, This is Money