Results from an independent consumer survey commissioned by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) show that 76 per cent of consumers are in favour of the UK government introducing a scrappage incentive scheme similar to those currently running across Europe.
The proposed scheme could see drivers of cars over nine years old offered a £2,000 incentive towards a new or nearly new car in return for scrapping their existing one. A similar scheme already operating in Germany has successfully boosted the new car market, increasing registrations by 21.5 per cent in February – the first year-on-year monthly rise since July 2008.
The survey, undertaken by MM-Eye, a market research company specialising in automotive research, showed that 61 per cent of people said they were likely to take up the offer and 66 per cent of people agreed with the idea of taking older cars off the road and replacing them with newer ones because of the positive environmental impact.
An average new car emits 14.6 per cent less CO2 than a nine year old model so the scrappage scheme would continue the trend in reducing car emissions, the society suggests. The survey backed this further, showing that people likely to take up the offer would be buying cars at the smaller end of the market, with the lowest CO2 emissions. 88 per cent of those likely to take up the offer said they’d spend up to £10,000 on a new car in addition to the £2,000 incentive. Nearly a third of cars newly registered in 2008 fell into this category2 and is the typical cost of a supermini model, which in 2008 emitted 137.7g/km, 12.8 per cent below the national average and over 25 per cent below the 1999 market average.
Commenting on the survey, SMMT chief executive Paul Everitt said; “The scrappage incentive scheme is a popular way for government to support the automotive industry and provides good value for money for the tax payer. The increased VAT revenue to government largely offsets the cost of the scheme, yet the positive impact it could have on building consumer confidence and boosting the new vehicle market are extremely valuable to the UK automotive sector and the 800,000 people that work within it”.
However not everyone agrees that scrappage incentives have a sound environmental basis. A study carried out by the OECD entitled ‘Cleaner cars Fleet Renewal and Scrappage Schemes, Guide to good practice’ published in 1999 concluded that ‘these schemes have a high average cost per tonne of pollution avoided and they do not compare favourably with other alternative policy tools on purely environmental grounds’.
Kerstin Meyer of the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E ) said;
“It is ironic that the car industry has cried foul every time a piece of environmental regulation has been put forward and demanded impact assessment after impact assessment. But they are strangely quiet on the subject of assessing the environmental benefits vs costs of scrapping incentives, despite billions of public money being at stake.”
