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When will the government start taxing and testing caravans
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[Deleted User]
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Road fund licence, vehicle tax, whatever you like to call it.
Caravans need to be taxed and tested annually. >:(
I would suggest taxed at the same rate as the towing vehicle and an all points annual MOT test.
They are a menace on the roads and not just in summer either.
They take up space, slow moving, travel in convoy and are driven by old people who should know better.
When a wheel comes off they just shatter into a million pieces of cardboard and plastic littering the motorway.
Time to end this tradition in Britain.
Move on to Motorhomes or Campervans as the way forward.
Death to the caravan R.I.P Good Riddance.
Caravans need to be taxed and tested annually. >:(
I would suggest taxed at the same rate as the towing vehicle and an all points annual MOT test.
They are a menace on the roads and not just in summer either.
They take up space, slow moving, travel in convoy and are driven by old people who should know better.
When a wheel comes off they just shatter into a million pieces of cardboard and plastic littering the motorway.
Time to end this tradition in Britain.
Move on to Motorhomes or Campervans as the way forward.
Death to the caravan R.I.P Good Riddance.
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Then it will be dogs. Dogs will need to wear a seatbelt or the owner will be fined £5,000 and have their car crushed.
She decided not to bother in the end, decided to hire a motorhome if need be.
My brother got a caravan, it is parked on my driveway as he have no where to park it, only use it for country and Weston festivals.
The Indians used to shoot blazing arrows into them in western movies.
no way we pay way too much in taxes in uk as it is.
Is that festivals in Weston super Mare?
Around here a lot of the houses are fairly small cottages and bungalows and, over the last few years, I've noticed that more and more off-street parking is getting filled up with caravans and box-trailers that never seem to move.
I'm assuming that people are buying these things, parking them up and using them as storage units.
That doesn't seem entirely appropriate.
How do you tax them then? You have to register them, so there's a new level of bureaucracy. Which caravans? All of them, or do we do it like cars and exempt anything older than <pick a year, it's 1974 for cars>? How much do you think it's worth taxing something that realistically does a few hundred miles per year if the owner is quite enthusiastic, a handful or none if not? Where do you draw the line - any trailer, trailer tents, folding vans or just full-sized vans? And do you take into account the additional fuel duty that towing a van any distance generates, and the VAT generated by caravanners buying stuff that they wouldn't otherwise buy and the jobs etc created in the leisure and farming industry where land has been set aside for caravanning? And what happens when a large majority of these hobby vans (that's what a lot are) are dumped or scrapped if it's going to cost even more to use them? Do we just accept that the small sites, the bigger sites, the CL sites on farms that farmers were encouraged to diversify into when the last govt decided that we don't need a farming industry, we just say "oh yeah - you can close down. Thanks anyway"?
Shouting "pay some road tax" is usually a sign that whoever is shouting it hasn't thought it through fully. And it's worth stating the bl----ing obvious that it is an offence to use a caravan on the road that doesn't conform to current safety requirements re brakes, tyres etc.
All taxpayers pay for the roads.
Reminds me...
I was watching a guy try to reverse his 'van on a local camp-site last year.
He had about three stabs at it and then gave up, unhitched his 'van and attempted to man-handle it into position.
Alas, the ground wasn't flat and as soon as he unhitched it the van rolled backwards and demolished the dry-stone wall behind it.
Some ideas aren't worth following through...
Well said sir.
Ah, that's what I was going to respond with.
I suppose it's arguable that, as local authorities spend more and more on accommodating bicyclists, they should become liable for some of that cost but, then again, if you generate, say, £1 million in revenue from a scheme that's cost £20 million to implement, what's the point?
A lot of the time I'm sure the real motive for these schemes is simply spite.
Up to you if you want to go down that path, but then you're on the slippery slope to people demanding better access to services based on what taxes they've paid. IMHO we as a country are better than that - we use taxes to pay for national resources and accept that some people who pay less may get more out those resources than others. It happens across the board; uniquely roads are seen as funded from VED. Bonkers or what?
True enough although I really do think that, as society changes, we need to accept that taxation sometimes needs to be changed too.
I mean, if you look at the situation with LPG (or even diesel) powered vehicles, back when they only accounted for a miniscule proportion of road users the tax was lower but then, as more people begin to use them, taxes are raised.
This happens because if you don't alter taxes to suit changing habits you end up with a nett deficit in income.
Let's face it, if 40 million people decided to use bicycles to get around and there ended-up only being a few thousand cars on the road, the government of the day would quickly find a way to tax bicycle users in order to recoup the lost revenue.
Anyway, as I said, I'm sure that when these topics come up the majority of "suggestions" tend to have a basis in spite rather than anything else and suggestions of taxing bicyclists, with society as it currently is at least, strike me as rooted in spite rather than any real desire to prevent a deficit in revenue.
I agree they shouldn't be subject to VED, but you could argue that towing a caravan increases the towing cars' emissions, and therefore the VED band could change...
I would support some kind of MOT - anything capable of being pulled at 50-60mph should be roadworthy
Personally, I just wish there was something required to enable them to be legal for road use, in order to prevent people from just buying them and leaving them parked on the street as wheeled storage units for years on end.
Good point and furthermore will it apply to all types of trailers both articulated, friges, boats, and ordinary trailers used to move stuff (dog box trailers etc etc .
Also impossible to enforce as most caravans are on private sites in summer and stored in wintertime.