Fuel Duty

Melanie Ward Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry]

I agree that those are good initiatives. I also celebrate the initiative of the Scottish Government, led by the Green party, to make bus fares free for people under 22. Young people desperately need that support because they rarely have access to the family car, as I mentioned.

All these interventions represent good value for money. This month, analysis by the Climate Change Committee has reminded us that we can significantly reduce the UK’s exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets if we just think a little further into the future and get things done. The Committee estimates that the transition will cost around £4 billion a year to make our climate targets. That is the cost of one oil shock like the one we are experiencing now, but it would deliver huge benefits, including resilience, the next time this happens, and we can predict that it might.

[Melanie Ward (Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way—I thought I would give her some further relief from the interventions from the manosphere on the Conservative Benches. She is talking about the importance of investing in clean energy to make our country more resilient and to do the right thing for the planet. Does she agree that doing that is often more cost effective for families as well? Just last week, I met with Fife Communities Climate Action Network in my constituency to talk about some of its great work to encourage and support insulation of people’s homes, for example. Does she agree that that is positive and that investing in clean energy—

[Dr Evans]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Has the hon. Lady finished her intervention?

[Melanie Ward]

indicated dissent.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

A point of order in the middle of an intervention, Dr Evans? I assume this point must be very pertinent and very urgent, but I will let the hon. Lady finish her intervention first.

[Melanie Ward]

Does the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry) agree that investing in clean, green, home-grown energy is the way to ensure that we have energy security for our country in the future?

[Dr Evans]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am grateful for the chance to make a point of order about the intervention made by the hon. Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward). She labelled the Conservative Benches “the manosphere”. Do you, Madam Deputy Speaker, think that it is suitable to use sex as a pejorative just because there happen to be only male Members sitting on the Conservatives Benches at this point in the debate? I would envisage it being a problem if I used such a term the opposite way to label only females sitting on the Labour Benches.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Evans]

To win the next election, because then we can deliver the change that we are talking about.

On reducing the cost of living—the Government’s No. 1 aim for January—it seems bizarre that the measures that are being put in place have done nothing to support that. The Prime Minister went on the news on Monday with a five-point plan to deal with what is going on. He said energy bills would be capped, but we already knew that because it was announced in the Budget and the cap is in place until July. He said the fuel duty cap would be extended until September, but we knew that because it was in the Budget and then it is set to rise.

[Melanie Ward]

Will the hon. Gentleman tell us what the Conservative policy was in relation to fuel duty at the last election? By my recollection, it was that fuel duty would have been higher under the Conservatives than it is now under this Labour Government.

[Dr Evans]

The best way to decide how someone is going to behave in the future is to look at their past habits: we froze fuel duty for 15 years, and when a crisis hit in 2022 we reduced it. That is exactly the point that I was trying to make when the hon. Lady intervened. The Government have come up with a plan that is a talking shop and not doing anything. In response to the situation in Iran, they have simply reannounced what was in the Budget and further conversations with the CMA and the heating oil firms to work out whether they should or should not do something. That is precisely the point I am making: the rhetoric from the Government was “We are going to go for growth” but they then put in place some anti-growth policies, whereas now the cost of living is the No. 1 priority, but they are simply talking about that and making things worse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)]

I raised this entirely inevitable circumstance with the Chancellor at the spring statement, and she did something that she is given to do, which was to glaze over briefly and then talk about the strength and broad shoulders of the Treasury because of the difficult decisions that she had taken, as though they affected her and not the working people up and down these islands who have had their bank accounts raided by an insatiable appetite for more and more tax from this Government.

[Melanie Ward]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dave Doogan]

How could I not give way to the Scottish Labour MP who has managed to come in here for the tail end of the debate?

[Melanie Ward]

That was a little bit unnecessary. The hon. Gentleman is talking about raising taxes, and I just wonder whether he would acknowledge that the SNP Scottish Government actually have higher taxes in place than the Government in England.

[Dave Doogan]

I am very happy to explain that to the hon. Lady when I get to that element of my speech, which I will in due course.

The other thing that really irritates me about this Government is the way that they talk about the just transition. They say, “We will be using fossil fuels for another 50 years, and we will be producing them in the United Kingdom”, as though they hold all the levers. Let me explain something to Members on the Government Front Bench: if they continue to apply Labour’s atrophying interventions in the North sea oil and gas sector, the industry, which is global—I do not know whether that is news to Ministers—will go somewhere where it can make a living and a profit and does not have some sort of nefarious Government taxing it out of existence.

The specific 5p fuel duty referred to in the motion, is regressive—that much is pretty clear—and iniquitous. It is particularly iniquitous to people who live in parts of these islands that are more remote, such as my constituency. I see that the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) is back in the Chamber. She detailed that her constituency is 2,076 sq km. This is not a competition, but Angus and Perthshire Glens is 5,525 sq km and 166% larger than her constituency, actually.

[Dave Doogan]

This is where I practise respectful disagreement.

For rural areas such as my constituency, the constituency of the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan, and many other places across all four nations, this issue is really challenging. There is not limited access to public transport in many places such as ours; there is no access to public transport in any meaningful sense. Remote areas get a lot more winter, and the people there tend to work in more agricultural professions. They tend to drive larger, heavier vehicles that are more fuel-hungry, so they will end up paying more. Deliveries have to come from further away, and that all gets added to the cost. Of course, all that adds to the cost to councils of delivering public services. The public services delivered in constituencies such as mine are very much more expensive to deliver than those in Holborn and St Pancras.

It is on that point that we need to see how much harder this issue will impact on people in rural areas. I have looked at the “Fuel Finder” app. At the BP petrol station at the bottom of Montrose before crossing the river, the price of a litre of petrol is 149.9p. If I go to the BP petrol station over at Vauxhall Bridge Road, the price of a litre of petrol is 5p cheaper. People in Scotland are already paying a premium that people in London and the south-east do not pay on their fuel, and the 5p that the Labour party wants to apply will come on top of that.

The UK rate of oil consumption for heating is 4.9%. In Angus and Perthshire Glens, the rate is 13%. Some 6,101 households heat their homes with oil. Oil has gone up sometimes by 150%, so a £300 to £400 delivery is getting on for £1,000. There are also punitive requirements for the volume that people get delivered. A further 2,000 people in my constituency are on tankered gas. That must not be forgotten in this cost spike crisis, which, as I said, I predicted at the Chancellor’s spring statement.

[Melanie Ward]

rose—

[Dave Doogan]

Before the hon. Lady gets back to her feet, she asked me about tax and she should be aware—although apparently she is not—that most income tax payers in Scotland pay less tax. Over and above that, her constituents do not have to pay for their tuition fees when they go to university. All her constituents, like my constituents, pay 30% less for their council tax than people in England. The Scottish living wage that her constituents benefit from is 74p per hour higher than the UK’s minimum wage. Of course, her constituents get the £40 Scottish child payment on top of all the other benefits that the SNP has delivered. On that note, I will take her intervention.

[Melanie Ward]

I could come back to the hon. Gentleman on all the ways in which my constituents are getting really poor value for money in Scotland, such as the cuts to police numbers in Fife and excessively long waiting lists in the NHS that are not falling, as they are under a Labour Government in England.

The hon. Gentleman talks about heating oil. He will be aware—in fact, I think he referenced it—of the additional £4.6 million for the Scottish Government that the Prime Minister announced on Monday to support people in rural areas and vulnerable households dealing with the increases in the price of heating oil caused by the war in the middle east. Can the hon. Gentleman tell us when the Scottish Government will make that funding available to his constituents and my constituents?

[Dave Doogan]

I do not have the detail of the Scottish Government’s plans, but I am pretty sure that nobody in England or anywhere else in the United Kingdom has received actual monetary support from that funding.

Let us be really clear. The Chancellor talks about the broad shoulders of the Treasury and says that thanks to her fiscal wit—if you can believe that—she has come up with £52.4 million. If we divide that money across the number of people who will need support, it comes out at about £35. That is £35 of support from a Labour Government for people seeing a £700-odd price shock in heating oil. Somebody somewhere in the Treasury needs to get themselves a calculator.

The fuel duty increase is inflationary: it will feed through to the prices of goods and services, all of which will subsequently have VAT added on to them. The 5p added to the price of fuel is actually 6p, because it is added before the VAT is added to the fuel, so it is not 5p at all.

I am pretty certain that we can read in the Government’s amendment to the motion the vacuous nature of their application to this subject. Like other right hon. and hon. Members, I am pretty confident that a wee bit closer to the time of the elections in Scotland and Wales in May, the Government will suddenly find the wit to scrap this hike in fuel duty. I am quite happy for them to do that, but as other people have pointed out, households are in crisis now. Now is the time for the Government to lead, but that will never happen with a Labour Government.

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

It is good to speak in this debate on a subject that is impacting on all our hard-working businesses, families, hauliers and those involved in the logistics industry—the rise in fuel duty.

It is clear that Labour is planning to put up fuel duty for the first time in 15 years. Despite the conflict in the middle east, which is pushing up inflation and the cost of petrol at the pump, we have a Chancellor who said in her spring statement that this Labour Government have “the right economic plan” and boasted that households would be better off. She is doubling down on her plan to hike fuel duty, fund more welfare handouts and scrap the two-child benefit cap. That is not benefiting the grafters who are driving local economic growth across our constituencies. That is why increasing fuel duty for the first time in 15 years is such a negative approach, and it is impacting on all those across our constituencies.

[Melanie Ward]

rose—

[Robbie Moore]

Last autumn, my constituent Lesley O’Brien got in touch with me with serious concerns about the ramifications of any potential fuel duty hikes on the road haulage sector. As well as being a trustee of the Road Haulage Association and the founder of the transport forum Freight People, Lesley is the joint managing director of Freightlink Europe, a haulage company based in my constituency in West Yorkshire. It is a traditional, family-run business, based on the core values of honesty, respect and a dedication to provide the best level of service to customers.

However, businesses such as Freightlink Europe, and the hard-working people who run them and are employed by them, face unprecedented difficulties. Many haulage companies and those involved in logistics have contacted me directly with their deep concerns. Through no fault of their own, the average profit margin for many of those businesses has been significantly reduced to only 2%, if not lower, and the cost of running a typical haulage business has increased by more than 22% in recent years.

[Melanie Ward]

I wanted to respond to the point that the hon. Gentleman made a moment ago. He said something to the effect that the people who would benefit from our Government lifting the two-child benefit cap were not grafters. Does he not agree that the people who will benefit from the two-child benefit cap being lifted are children who were living in poverty, and that the majority of the households that those children live in are, in fact, in work? They are grafters.

[Robbie Moore]

My firm view is that the Government should be supporting all of those individuals to drive economic growth across the country. By removing the two-child cap, the Government are saying to those families who have worked out what their household spending power will be over a long period of time, “If you want to have more than two children, the Government will step in and pay for you.” That negatively impacts hard-working families that have made those hard fiscal decisions throughout. The reality is that increasing the level of welfare spending by taxing businesses such as those across my constituency—those involved in the haulage industry and the logistics sector that will now see a hike in the price of fuel—negatively impacts those who are driving economic growth, and therefore impacts everybody.