Mr. Ian Talbot:

I was the one who probably mentioned that point and I mentioned the carbon tax as an example of an initiative where people knew what change was coming. What I had in mind were the big changes that lie ahead for the economy. Let us take electric vehicles as an example. How do we in this case deal with the issue of road tax and make up for the loss of revenue from diesel and other fuel taxes and excise duties that we charge now, if we are all driving electric cars? I know we are some way from that reality, but we must start bringing people towards that transition. People are very opposed to a perceived new tax now. I know it can be difficult politically but we are ducking some of these decisions or roadmaps regarding changes we know are coming.

We have, for example, our targets for the numbers of electric vehicles to have on the roads. This means that someone, I hope, somewhere in the Department of Finance has a spreadsheet detailing what this transformation is going to mean for the reduction in excise duties and where the money for this is going to come from. It must come from somewhere and people need to know where that is going to be. This is more of an example of what I had in mind and the need to start thinking long term. A period of three years is interesting. Outside, we were talking about benefit-in-kind and company cars. This measure was laid out three years ago and everybody understood it, but when it came to January and people got their payslips-----