Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

I was glad to hear the Minister state in his contribution that he is still considering bringing forward legislation to abolish the county manager and city manager systems and to have what would be effectively elected managers. I hope that ambition will be realised, although it is fair to say it is likely the Government will not survive. There are many other areas of this Minister's administration, particularly in regard to building regulations, on which he has been gravely deficient.

On the Bill before the House, it is fair to say that motorists and commuters were hammered under the 2009 budget, with the spiralling cost of petrol and diesel imposing a heavy financial burden on households. In addition, the Bill facilitates the increase in motor tax of 4% for cars below 2.5 litres and 5% for cars above that.

The area covered in the Bill is part of a wide range of extra charges and taxes that are imposed under the 2009 budget, including the VAT increases, the 1% levy, the €200 urban car parking tax and the air travel tax. The combined impact of those increases are having a detrimental impact on commuters and workers. It has been noted that at least 2,000 jobs are at risk in the car industry, with a massive downturn in sales.

I welcome the initial introduction of changes to the vehicle registration tax and the tax regime to incentivise the purchase of lower emissions vehicles as laid out in section 3. That is particularly important given the huge increase in transport CO2 emissions in the 15 years to 2006 of nearly 170% and the major dependence on cars.

I note that the rebalancing of motor taxes and fuel economy labelling at most will lead to a reduction in transport emissions of just 0.05 Mt CO2 equivalent. It appears many measures have been brought forward which will have a limited impact.

Many constituents and motorists across the country had been ahead of the game in purchasing lower emissions vehicles before this legislation was introduced and they feel hard done by as they were left paying a higher rate than a new lower emissions car registered after 1 July 2008. There have been other suggestions that given the scale of reduction in transport carbon emissions needed we should consider wider reforms that would amalgamate the current duplicate VRT and motor tax into one tax that is entirely based on the car's level of CO2 emissions.

Last year I asked the Minister for Transport, Deputy Dempsey, to provide a breakdown of the number of cars in total in the vehicle fleet classified by level of CO2 emissions. At that stage, the Minister could only release data for 28% of the private car fleet because the national vehicle driver file only began the collection of CO2 data in May 2004. Over 400,000 cars out of the total of 525,273 had emissions of between 141 g/km and 225 g/km. The Minister had no information at that stage on commercial vehicles. There are serious ongoing problems with the operation of the national vehicle driver file.

It must be said that the Government has been lethargic regarding the necessity to move the Government itself and the public administration towards increasing fuel efficiency. It is notable that the Government, in the roll-out of the One Small Step, Power of One campaign, did not lead by example in terms of its own vehicles.

As my colleague mentioned, yesterday we had the announcement by the Ministers, Deputies Dempsey and Ryan, on the nationwide roll-out of electric cars. Whenever we hear the Minister, Deputy Dempsey, making some major proposal, as the Acting Chairman might agree, and as some of the Fianna Fáil backbenchers do, they are often like crazy daydreams which never translate into reality. If we look back a number of years we can see that nothing has been achieved. It was striking yesterday that much of the presentation on the electric transport vision for the future was about new studies by Sustainable Energy Ireland and new contacts with other countries and administrations across Europe, with little real delivery on the ground or real encouragement for people to change to electric vehicles or larger vehicles.

The Bill is a small step on the way towards a more fuel efficient transport fleet but I have no confidence in the Minister administering it or in the Minister for Transport.

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