Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is an anomaly that allows businesses to reclaim VAT on diesel but not on petrol. I do not propose a recommendation but I ask the Minister of State to examine how diesel and petrol are treated differently. There may be an issue on how hybrids are being treated and so on. This is separate from the Finance Act but there is a different tax treatment for businesses between diesel and petrol, which significantly disadvantages both plug-in and self-charging hybrids in the company car market. I ask the Minister of State to look into the removal of this anomaly, which allows a VAT reclaim on only diesel fuel and, thereby, excludes the drivers of hybrid company cars from this relief used for business mileage. I ask the Minister of State to examine this policy again. There does not appear to be a logical argument for allowing such relief on only one of the two current fuels that are widely used. It is clearly the case that earlier arguments that suggested that petrol cars are more likely to be abused for private use than diesel cars are now wide of the mark since there is no clear demographic divide between the purchase of vehicles that use these two fuels with the purchase decision, more often than not, being simply economically motivated.

Deputy Michael McGrath has tabled parliamentary questions on this matter. I ask the Minister of State to look at that issue in the long term because it is something I have been asked about by people involved in the motor industry generally. We have acknowledged at this stage that while the Government was incentivising people to move towards diesel years ago, it has been discovered that diesel is probably in many ways more damaging for our urban environments given the emissions it produces and so on. This anomaly should be examined.