Road tax plan is "highway robbery"

Plans for a 'pay-as-you-drive' road tax scheme, which a government-backed report claims would raise £28bn, have been given a furious reception by silicon.com's readers.

Cries of "stealth tax", "highway robbery" and "goodbye civil liberties, hello big brother" sounded from nearly all readers.

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Many pointed out that the fuel tax already provides a way to tax drivers per mile.

Others suggested the scheme wasn't really about taxes. IT worker John H Woods said: "This is not about taxation ... it's about surveillance."

Woods added: "Although fuel tax is a perfectly efficient way of taxing driving, it doesn't allow you, as a government, to know exactly where all your citizens are 24 hours a day."

One reader complained citizens need greater assurance the tax they're already paying will be put to good use. Rosaleen McCarthy, an academic from Cambridge, said: "Road tax and petrol tax already mean that driving is heavily penalised. We need a sensible fraction of this taxation to fund road engineering and joined-up public transport - not another (doomed?) government IT initiative."

Many readers complained about the cost of the scheme and were sceptical it would provide any benefit to road-users. John in Hampshire said the scheme "will cost us, the tax payers, billions of pounds over the coming decades".

He added: "And we will still be sitting in our cars getting nowhere fast."

The daily commute may be one of the main causes of congestion but an anonymous IT manager from Letchworth pointed out that the new road charges would have no affect on this. "This whole concept is based on a faulty premise: that people travel in their cars by choice at rush hour," he said.

A lone positive note came from Peter Shearman, a programme executive from London, who said we should all be more open-minded about this "fundamentally fairer and more progressive policy" that will cut emissions and congestion.