Road pricing Will the chancellor grasp the nettle to make up for lost fuel duty?

While the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, grapples with the parlous £40bn funding gap in Britain's finances, another £25bn of annual revenue is revving up to disappear into the sunset.

- Gwyn Topham

As the Treasury knows all too well, the move to electric vehicles will spell the end of that great money-spinner fuel duty. But no one appears ready to grab the wheel and tax motoring in a different way.

Road pricing was the future, once, and Tony Blair, its last champion in Downing Street, is back, via his Tony Blair Institute thinktank, to push for it again.

Proponents of road pricing - metering, charging, pay-per-mile - have traditionally been driven by two goals: managing road congestion and raising revenue from motoring more fairly. The former most concerned the last Labour government; the latter has become a clear and present danger for the Treasury.

That £25bn from fuel duty, levied on petrol and diesel at the pumps, more or less covers the entire cost of Britain's road and railway system. But electric cars, paying nothing, make up almost a fifth of new registrations.

Blair's thinktank is the latest group to weigh in before Reeves's budget on Wednesday, urging her to introduce a road charge of 1p a mile for cars and vans, and 2.5p to 4p for lorries and HGVs - "a crucial step in reforming motoring taxation for the electric-vehicle era [and] preventing a growth-stifling rise in congestion".

It follows the Campaign for Better Transport, which suggests pay-per-mile charges initially for electric vehicles alone - supported by a host of other groups, including the RAC - declaring the need for similar reform. The chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, Sir John Armitt, said road pricing was "inevitable".

But is it? Motorists have got used to being treated with kid gloves come budget time. Conservative chancellors since George Osborne have made great play of freezing fuel duty - with Rishi Sunak's temporary 5p cut in 2022 leaving it at 52.9p - to much acclaim from the rightwing press, for whom protecting the interests of the "white van man" is a totemic issue.