Last week, the party announced an emergency transport package: 10p off fuel duty, £1 bus fares, a 10% rail cut, lower VAT on public EV charging. And the reaction from members has been… pretty muted. I think that tells us something. There’s a shared instinct here that the package doesn’t quite land, and it’s worth working out why.
It’s not that responding to a crisis is wrong. People are paying more to get around because of a war they didn’t start, and a responsible opposition should have something to say about that. The question is whether what we’re saying is distinctively liberal, or whether we’ve produced the package that any of the three parties could have announced on any given Tuesday.
Start with the centrepiece: a 10p cut in fuel duty. This is, bluntly, a regressive measure wearing compassionate clothing. Higher-income households drive more, drive larger vehicles, and capture more of the benefit. The “parent in rural Devon” does real rhetorical work in the press release, but the primary beneficiaries of a universal fuel subsidy are people who drive a lot, and that correlates reliably with income.
More fundamentally, we are in the middle of an energy price shock caused by a war over fossil fuels. The liberal response to that should not be “let’s make fossil fuels cheaper.” You cannot credibly argue for the energy transition while subsidising the thing you’re transitioning away from the moment prices rise. Policy should help people through that shift, not reverse the price signal whenever it bites.
There’s also a basic supply-and-demand problem here. If the Iran war continues or escalates, fuel supplies could be seriously constrained. In that scenario, higher prices do useful if painful work: they reduce consumption, which is exactly what you need when there might not be enough to go around. Cutting duty does the opposite. It stimulates demand at the moment you most need to conserve. That’s not just bad climate policy. It’s bad crisis management.
The bus and rail elements are better. A £1 bus fare is genuinely progressive and I’d love to see it become permanent. A 10% rail cut is at least the right direction. But both are temporary, set for three months, and three months of cheaper tickets doesn’t restore a single cut route or reverse the structural decay that created the problem.
Because here’s what the crisis actually exposes: the reason people in rural and suburban communities are so vulnerable to fuel price shocks is that we’ve spent two decades stripping away the alternatives. Bus mileage outside London has fallen by 29% since 2005. Whole towns and villages are classified as transport deserts. Millions of people don’t drive because they love driving. They drive because there is literally no other way to get to work, to the GP, to the shops. That’s not a lifestyle choice. It’s a policy failure, and a temporary fuel duty cut treats it as a fact of life rather than something we should be fixing.
This is where a liberal party should be planting its flag. Not on “we’ll cut your fuel bill for three months” but on “we’ll make sure you’re never this trapped again.” That means a coverage guarantee so no community is cut off from jobs, education, and healthcare. It means bus re-regulation so routes are run in the public interest rather than abandoned the moment they stop being profitable. It means targeted support for low-income households and genuinely car-dependent workers, not universal subsidies that flow mostly to people who don’t need them. And it means framing the whole thing as resilience: a transport system that doesn’t collapse whenever oil prices spike.
None of that fits neatly into a press release. It doesn’t give you the headline “Lib Dems demand 10p off a litre.” But it does give you something the other parties can’t offer: a serious, structural answer to a problem that temporary cash won’t fix. The silence from members isn’t hostility to the leadership. It’s the sound of people who know we can do better than this. The Iran crisis will pass, or it won’t, but the bus routes won’t come back on their own, and the next fuel shock will find us just as exposed unless we use this moment to make the case for genuine transformation. Not managing the pain of car dependency, but ending it.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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32 Comments
Agree 100% ref the price of fuel.
The general policy should be to tax use of non- renewable resources more, while supporting better alternatives (such as public transport), with targeted support for poorer people adversely affected.
Really good article.
Small footnote point. It is worth noting that even in London bus passenger numbers have fallen quite significantly since 2014. Cutting congestion, increasing average bus speeds and ensuring bus services are not cut are other policies needed in London, and many cities and urban areas – along with a network of trams that matches France.
“ higher prices do useful if painful work: they reduce consumption”
Yes, and lower income households will be the ones who are forced to reduce their consumption long before the well off.
A truly liberal approach would not be to use the price mechanism to reduce consumption – knowing it disproportionately impacts on the poorest – but would seek to ration the consumption of available supplies on a non-price basis.
A more Liberal policy wold be to impose a seed limit of of 80kph (50mph) as was done in the 1970s.
I do agree with the main points of the article but do support cheaper fuel not just because it’ll help workers and people but if the gov. did do it it’ll be a easy political win for the Lib Dems – the narrative could be that a popular Labour policy (which I’m sire this would be) is just Lib Dem policy.
Maybe the party was sparing a thought for the shift worker earning just above the minimum wage going to work at 5am in a £1500 ford fiesta. Earning a living and doing a job that most who post on here couldn’t envisage or survive on. Targeted support is a bureaucratic nightmare. Most industrial estates are on the edge of towns or further afield. Ending car dependency – sure fire vote loser….
@Craig. Perhaps, not always, but public transport can play a role even for the jobs you describe as Amazon discovered in Kent: https://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/19537740.new-24-7-bus-service-serve-amazons-dartford-warehouse/
The wider issue is that cutting the tax on petrol benefits the most high income households – people who drive SUVs, who drive long distances and families with two or three cars. These people save far more than people driving a Fiesta a few miles every day for work reasons.
Who knows how this will end? But suppose the Gulf of Hormuz is closed in the long term. World wide consumption of fossil fuel has to fall by a fifth. As I see it there are three basic routes whereby this happens. First chaos – as in long queues at petrol filling stations, secondly state rationing [and certain uses like fertilisers and pumping water and sewage are going to rank far higher than private car usage] and finally price. If HMG intervenes to reduce prices then more of the burden of adjusting to lower levels of fossil fuel availability are going to fall on the other two routes – chaos and rationing. In my opinion that is definitely the wrong way to go and the policy proposed is a bad one.
Not everyone works at Amazon Mark.
It’s the same argument in raising tax thresholds – it’s a fact of life . Ending car dependency is warm milk and cookies stuff. Good luck on the doorstep with that around the shires & leafy suburbia…
@Joan, you’ve put your finger on the real problem with my argument and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. When prices do the rationing, it’s the poorest who get squeezed first. That’s true and it matters. Where I’d push back is on what follows from it. I don’t think the answer is to suppress prices across the board, because that ends up subsidising the people using the most fuel. I’d rather let prices do what they’re going to do anyway and put real money behind protecting the households who can’t absorb the hit. Fuel vouchers, expanded Warm Home Discount, a proper lifeline for people who genuinely have no alternative to the car.
On non-price rationing, I’m genuinely uncertain. In a long crisis, it might be unavoidable, and Richard’s comment above makes the case well. My worry is that you end up with something that’s slow to implement and clumsy once it’s running. But I’d rather have that conversation than pretend cutting duty solves anything.
The bit of your comment I keep coming back to is the implicit challenge: a liberalism that shrugs at regressive outcomes because the market sorted it isn’t really liberalism at all. I agree. That’s why I think the package needed the protection piece built in from the start, not as an afterthought.
@Craig, I think you’ve got this one back to front. The shift worker in the Fiesta is exactly the person the package lets down. A 10p cut on fuel duty gives a few quid a week to someone doing short runs in a small car, and hundreds of pounds to the household running two big SUVs on the school run. If you care about the 5am start on minimum wage, handing a universal subsidy to everyone with a petrol tank is a strange way to show it.
And targeted support isn’t a bureaucratic nightmare. We already means-test Universal Credit, Council Tax Support, Warm Home Discount, free school meals, pension credit. The systems exist. Whether we use them to get help to the people who actually need it, or just spread money thinly across everyone including the people who don’t, is a political choice, not an administrative one.
On ‘ending car dependency’ as a vote loser, you’re arguing with a slogan, not a policy. Nobody on the doorstep wants to be told their car is the problem. But plenty of people in the shires and the leafy suburbs would quite like a bus that runs when they need it, a train that’s affordable, and not having to be the family taxi for their teenagers. It’s the same policy. Our job is to find the framing that lands, not to give up on the thing itself.
Shutting the Strait of Hormuz will make Britain (and everone else except non-gulf oil states) worse off. Ulitmately we have to decide how much of that hit different groups of people will take. Fuel subsidies, vouchers and other incentives to carry on generating CO2 are not the answer. If you want to protect the poor from any consequences, the best way is to raise benefits. That way, any poor people who do switch to buses, bikes or feet will be better off.
” going to work at 5am in a £1500 ford fiesta.”
On Autotrader there are plenty of used Nissan Leaf’s for less than £2,500. Ok, the range is usually quite low, under 70 miles or so, but many people work less than 30 miles from home – could charge overnight on cheap rates…cost less than 3p/ mile against nearly 20p /mile for the fiesta.
Perhaps the author should speak to families who have no choice but to use a car and for whom every £ extra on fuel duty is another £ taken out of the household budget.
Tanya means testing comes with a cut off point . A particular cruel one if your the wrong side of it. As always so many miss out when it’s comes to claiming – that’s the other downside of applying. The only people I see on the bus are the poor , low paid workers , the elderly , and college kids – if you’ve the money you buy a car, it’s an aspiration see Tony Blair’s Sierra man comment. . Who’s going to fund this huge expanse in public transport across the country to ‘end car dependency’ …. Nothing to do with slogans it’s about being realistic – hardly anybody will give up the convenience of having a car – who wants a bus to an out of town supermarket at 8.30pm on a January night!
In London we only have about 1 car for every four people. Where you have good public transport, people use it.
There is a supply problem with oil and gas which forces up prices. If there is less oil and gas available we have to make do with less. Price is the rationing mechanism in the absence of any other rationing mechanism.
So a cut in fuel duty is an attempt to make petrol etc more affordable at the same time as the price mecahnism is acting to make it less affordable and so match demand to available siupplies.
So if all customers in all countries did this the only ones to be to gain would be the oil suppliers. It’s more complicated in just a few countries did this. There is a theoretical argument that the exchange rate would changeto compensate and so defeat the purpose of the effective subsidy. It’s more likley IMO that it could give UK consumers an advantage over consumers in other countries though.
Which ever way it goes less oil and gas means that someone, somewhere, has to to manage with less.
There’s no getting away from that.
@Simon I suggest you read the piece again. The whole argument is for the families who have no choice but to drive. That’s exactly why I’d rather see fuel vouchers and a proper rural transport guarantee than a universal subsidy that hands most of its money to people who don’t need it. Caring about car-dependent families and opposing a 10p duty cut are not in tension.
@Craig, you’ve actually got a fair point about the means-test cliff edges and poor take-up. Both are real problems, and any decent targeted scheme has to be designed around them. But your other observation undercuts your own case. You say the only people you see on the bus are the poor, the elderly and college kids. That’s not an argument against public transport. That’s a description of what happens when you let it rot. Look at Peter Davies’s comment above: in London, where the buses actually work, there’s one car for every four people. Make the bus good, and people will use it. That’s not a slogan. It’s just what the evidence shows.
Excellent article, and the key point that stands out to me is that this was a launch of a cheap headline that said nothing about what Liberal Democrats stand (stood) for. Anyone of any politics or none could have made that press release.
Keep on pressing the points.
Excellent article Tanya and great responses in the subsequent chat. From a policy perspective I am totally with you. However, from a political perspective I am not so concerned about the party calling for a temporary cut in fuel duty. (Whereas the other measures should not be temporary). For the less well off driver I am pretty sure they don’t care if this benefits the gas guzzling Chelsea tractor mob more than it does them – they just want a break from higher prices. (It is also possible, maybe probable now, that the better off are able to use the Tesla instead of the Range Rover – most better off people I know now have at least one EV in the drive.)
It is a shame that the policy and the headline is on the fuel, not the shift to better, cheaper, public transport. Luxembourg can deliver free public transport, why can’t we?
As would be expected from Tanya, this is an excellent article, about an important matter. Starmer seems unable to distinguish between genuine efforts to improve lives and measures designed to boost his own popularity. Buying votes by lowering prices for all is completely wrong in the current context, when the benefits of letting events curtail demand should be obvious.
I’d say there is a little more to getting everyone back on public transport than making it good.
It works in London because using a car is difficult. There is still a problem of congestion – albeit that it would be even worse without congestion charges,including ULEZ and high parking costs. But those of course are other reasons for not using a car in London.
In other words there needs to be both elements of the carrot and stick approach to solving the problem.
But outside London and other bigger cities there isn’t much “stick”. That’s going to be a difficult one electorally.
Totally agree with @Tanya’s article.
Also agree with @Peter that good public transport, while necessary, is not by itself sufficient. The huge amount of congestion in London shows that far too many people still choose to drive, even for journeys that are perfectly doable by public transport. And that’s before you even think about people choosing to drive 1/4 mile to their local shop just to buy a carton of milk or something. We really should be thinking about how the Government can encourage a culture shift so people understand that every car journey causes huge harm to other people and to the community, and therefore that driving should be for when there is no reasonable alternative. And yes, that does mean that campaigning for a reduction in fuel duty is totally the wrong policy.
A major factor in people’s attachment to cars is the supermarkets’ giving free parking as a loss leader. It encourages the big shop. Business rate reform or site-value rating might help here.
@ Peter Davies Oh, dear, oh dear, any policy leading to charging for supermarket car parking would be one of the biggest vote losers I could ever imagine. You really cannot be serious.
Last year more than 50% of car sales in the UK were SUVs, a pretty shocking statistic. After the Covid shut-down, manufacturers started producing more of them, because they are more profitable, but it also seems car buyers haven’t got the message about avoiding extravagant use of fossil fuels. We have seen fun being poked at drivers of ‘Chelsea tractors’ where 4x4s are unnecessary, but I think this may have actually been counter-productive.
A few days ago a lady objected to me being on the road on my bicycle, and said I should be riding on the pavement. When I pointed out that that was illegal, she patted me on the arm and said “never mind, dear.” I’m sure the reason she felt entitled to be patronising was that her huge 4×4 signalled her superior status over a mere cyclist. In other words, ridiculing the ‘green welly brigade’ for their 4×4 cars has made the ownership of an SUV more, not less, attractive, because it’s seen as confirming membership of the middle classes.
We need a policy to undo this misconception.
Sadly once again a naive bureaucratic solution being put forward on LDV to deal with a urgent problem. How long does the author think we have to deal with this crisis?
1. ‘a coverage guarantee so no community is cut off from jobs, education, and healthcare’ – How long to develop and implement effectively?
2. ‘Bus re-regulation’ – How many months/years to implement?
3. ‘framing the whole thing as resilience’ when people see the problem as my petrol has shot up in price.
Let’s be clear – there are fuel blockades in Ireland already. Next week they will probably be here unless government takes the initiative and clearly says we are on your side. LIb Dems saying “Look at our cunning long term plan”, just won’t cut it.
The real long term plan may well be built around ‘How do we cope with 20% less fuel and gas?’ but that comes after the current price spike has been addressed at least in part and the civic unrest problem minimised.
@David, I’m going to take the substance of your comment seriously, and there is substance in it. But I want to flag something first, because you’re the third man in this thread to open with some version of ‘you haven’t thought about this properly’. Simon suggested I go and speak to real families. Craig told me my ideas were warm milk and cookies. You’ve gone with ‘naive bureaucratic solution’. None of those are arguments. They’re ways of implying the author needs to be educated before the conversation can begin, and women in policy debates get that treatment with a regularity that stops being coincidence. I’d like the actual disagreement without the editorial, please.
Now, your real points. You’re right that urgency matters, and the structural stuff is a multi-year project that won’t help anyone filling up next Tuesday. Fair point, fairly made.
But ‘fast’ and ‘universal fuel duty cut’ aren’t the same thing. If the worry is hardship now, the machinery for getting money to people who need it already exists. An emergency uplift to the Warm Home Discount, a cost-of-living payment through Universal Credit, fuel vouchers for rural and shift workers. These can be stood up in weeks, not years, and they get help to the households that actually can’t absorb the shock. A duty cut is fast, sure, but it sends most of the money to people who could afford the higher price. That isn’t a trade-off between speed and targeting. It’s just bad targeting at speed.
On blockades, I’d be careful. ‘The government must act or there’ll be unrest’ is an argument that rewards whoever shouts loudest, and that’s rarely the poorest.
And your closing point, about coping with twenty per cent less fuel, is exactly the conversation the party should be leading. I’d just rather we started it now than wait for the next shock to force it on us.
“The shift worker in the Fiesta is exactly the person the package lets down.” Actually the cleaner who gets paid minimum wage by the hour when on site but spends much of the day traveling between sites at their own expense. Unfortunately they are also in one of the groups that Universal Credit lets down. Broadly the approach of targeting support on the poor is right but we don’t yet have a good mechanism for that.
“could charge overnight on cheap rates…cost less than 3p/ mile against nearly 20p /mile for the fiesta.”
“most better off people I know now have at least one EV in the drive.)”
The key word here though is “drive”. A *LOT* of people don’t have a drive and the ability to have a home charging point is therefore limited.
Surely, the correct policy response to a rise in fuel prices in a car dependant society is to increase incentives to purchase or rent electric vehicles. Cheap grants that allow families to use electric vehicles and stop using internal combustion powered vehicles would fulfil at least 3 policy objectives while showing the electorate that we care about the issues facing us and the world.
Thanks for writing this Tanya. My reaction was to be absolutely furious with our party leadership especially Ed Davey. He was Environment Secretary and knows much better than this. As you say, now is the moment to be saying never again to such crises and supporting those trying to transition to electric vehicles (including e-bikes). Fortunately, we are seeing those that can reacting sensibly to higher fuel prices by increasing walking and cycling https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fuel-prices-drivers-walking-cycling-iran-war-b2959947.html. Fuel duty cuts also happens to be a policy that the RAC is on record as saying does not actually work for motorists https://www.bbc.co.uk /news/articles/cm2nrneym82o. As you say it helps the richest NEF research says only 7% of the savings from cutting fuel duty will go to the poorest fifth of households – while one-third will go to the richest fifth – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/21/the-guardian-view-on-fuel-duty-cuts-expediency-over-the-environment. There are numerous things the UK govert and parties can do short term – incentivising car pooling, making it cheaper to get a bike or e-bike, supporting more work work for those that can. The party should put our leadership on trial for this sell-out of environmental policies next conference. I really hope this does not become a tuition fee moment selling out the values we stand for for a cheap (well actually quite expensive) headline.