UK motorists need smarter tactics, not higher taxes

Chancellor stalling on Budget plan for drivers, says The Car Expert’s Stuart Masson

As the Chancellor prepares to deliver the Budget on 26 November 2025, UK motorists are bracing for yet another round of muddled, whack-a-mole politics. For years, we’ve seen governments tinker around the edges of motoring policy with no coherent strategy, no clear priorities, and no understanding of how real people actually buy, own, and run their cars. The result? An inconsistent, short-term approach that costs drivers money and leaves the industry second-guessing every move.

This Budget is an opportunity to start again – to put in place a long-term plan that makes motoring fairer, reduces running costs for ordinary families, and supports the health of the new and used car markets.

First, UK motorists need clarity on taxation. There’s a lot of noise about EV grants and pay-per-mile systems. But you can’t bolt a pay-per-mile scheme onto the existing structure and hope it works, especially when, just a couple of months ago, you started throwing hundreds of millions of pounds at car manufacturers in the form of grants on certain new EVs.

A pay-per-mile tax on EVs will do more harm to the uptake of electric vehicles than any of the other issues drivers face when considering a switch from petrol to electric power, and the lack of thought behind how such a system would even work shows that this is not a serious proposal. Unless you completely rebuild how we tax cars from the ground up, it’s going to be unworkable. The government must stop floating ideas it hasn’t thought through, especially ones that go against the grain of what they’ve recently put in place.

Next, fix the ‘expensive car’ supplement, which applies to all cars with a list price of £40,000. Right now, it’s catching perfectly ordinary family SUVs and estate cars – the kinds of vehicles people need, not luxury indulgences. If we want families to move into cleaner, safer, more efficient models, we can’t punish them with arbitrary charges.

The UK government needs to remember that support isn’t just about new cars. More than 80% of car transactions in the UK are used. If people can’t afford new models and the used market is strained for supply, prices rise. It’s simple supply and demand. We need policies that help motorists with the cost of buying and running a used car.

Thousands of pounds in new car grants don’t help the millions of UK car buyers who are only able to afford a used car. A better plan would be to implement a grant scheme that helps people get out of older, more polluting, petrol and diesel cars into newer, but still used, electric cars at a more affordable price point. That would help drive much more significant improvements to air quality while helping to protect used EV values.

Then there’s fuel duty, which must be treated responsibly. More than half of what we pay at the pump is already tax, and duty has been frozen for more than a decade. If the government is serious about pay-per-mile, it must be thought through as a replacement for fuel duty, not an add-on. In many ways, fuel duty already acts like pay-per-mile – the more you drive, the more you pay. Leave it alone for now, and focus instead on helping people choose more efficient cars when they next buy.

Aside from fuel, other costs are rising. Apparently, the government now wants to raise the cost of annual MOT tests, just at a time when consumers can least afford it. Garages are arguing that they can’t sustain the current pricing, so the government needs to make hard decisions. If you’re going to make MOT tests more expensive, maybe we need to look at only requiring them every two years, rather than every year. Safety groups and garages won’t like it, but we can’t expect taxpayers to keep forking out more cash to cover the government’s lack of overall planning.

The reality is simple: the government is stretched for cash, but that’s precisely why we need smarter spending and smarter taxation. Motorists are not asking for handouts, they’re asking for a plan. A stable, consistent strategy that the country commits to because the goal is clear, not because someone in Whitehall has had a bright idea that week.

At The Car Expert, the most-read pages on our site remain our guides on the most cost-efficient ways to buy and sell a car. That tells you everything about what people want right now: clarity, predictability, and value.

This Budget should deliver exactly that – not more noise, not more muddle, but a credible roadmap for motoring in the UK. Drivers need smarter tactics, not higher taxes.

Stuart Masson is founder and editor at automotive consumer advice platform The Car Expert