Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-04-Speech-1-101"
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"en.20060904.18.1-101"2
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"Mr President, as you have probably gathered from the number of Irish contributors, this is a very vexed issue in my own country. In Ireland we consider VRT to be a national tax and we consider the mix of taxation, the rate of taxation, to be a matter falling within national competence. Having said that, we are now holding out a prospect of abolishing VRT and perhaps somewhat dishonestly indicating to Irish consumers that at last they may get a car at a much cheaper rate, in much the same way as in other Member States. In fact, it was one of the carrots dangled during the single market debate in Europe – sign on here, vote yes, you will have cheaper cars.
What we are talking about here will be budget-neutral, that has been said and on that we all agree and it will be the motoring public that will bear the cost of the tax if VRT is abolished. In Ireland VRT totals EUR 1.15 billion, which is a huge amount in a very small country. I do not want to see that put on direct income tax or any direct taxes. If we need that money to run our country – and that is a matter for our national government – it must still be collected from the motoring public. We must be equitable and fair as to how that is done.
Having said that, I am all for balancing the taxation structure of motoring in order to decrease emissions - carbon emissions and particles and NOx and all the rest, but how that is done in each Member State is up to each Member State to decide and this is what we must be very careful about. I would love to see this debate taken side by side with the debate tomorrow on national allocation plans in relation to our Kyoto targets. We should be talking about sectoral targets for CO2 emissions and here transport is one of the biggest sinners. It is in that context that we should be talking about taxation on passenger cars and indeed all vehicles. This lack of joined-up thinking between two different sectors or two different parts of the DG in the Commission upsets me, because it is really part of tomorrow's debate as well and I would just like to make that point very clear.
Manufacturers of cars have been selling cars to countries like Ireland, where there is a high rate of VRT, at a much cheaper rate than they have been selling them to other countries that have no VRT or very low rates of it. The manufacturers will increase the price of their cars, so our consumers may not benefit from the abolition of VRT.. Would that they could, but let us be honest with them."@en1
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