Great Western Coffee Shop

I can understand why fuel duty has been cut by 5p / litre, but I can't help feeling that it does not help the environmental / sustainable / climate agenda, nor encourage people to(wards) greener public transport.

I agree, petrol and diesel prices are at a record high, BUT only slightly in excess of levels reached about 10 years ago.

I wish that train and bus fares had been held down to levels only slightly above those charged 10 years ago, many have doubled.

The climate emergency is now very last year, with government policies that make motoring cheaper and trains ever more expensive.

Marion and I probably drive around 100 miles per week. Our car is a Yaris automatic doing around 10 miles per litre. So our saving is 50p per week! Meanwhile, our electricity supplier has give notice that our expected bill will rise by almost £900 next year. This covers all our energy costs as the village has no gas supply.
All this to be funded by the 3.1% pension increase at a time of almost 8% inflation

Not everything can be subservient to the green agenda and it can't always be the primary consideration.

There are (for example) people who live in (often poorer) rural areas with little or no access to public transport who have no choice but to drive, and/or need their vehicles for work.

As someone who lives in a rural area, I'd be much more able to travel by public transport if our district council subsidised buses to the same extent they subsidise car parking.

Presumably no worries about those in poorer areas who are reliant on public transport for work ? bus and train fares have roughly doubled during the time that petrol prices have increased only slightly.

A fair point but a different argument. Ideally the issues of high bus & rail fares should also be addressed.

Fair points, up to a point. But in Sunak's statement the green agenda wasn't a primary, secondary or even a tertiary consideration: it wasn't a consideration at all. This at a time when polar temperatures have been more than 30 Celsius above normal (https://phys.org/news/2022-03-hot-poles-antarctica-arctic-degrees.html).

And who gets the most benefit from a blunt reduction in fuel duty? Poorer people with smaller more fuel-efficient cars, or wealthier people with larger, less-efficient vehicles?

Hauliers keeping the country fed, clothed, medicated...?

You beat ne to it  ;D

In addition, looking at it purely in terms of fuel costs vs. public transport is also too simplistic for other reasons.

There are many places in the UK that never had a train service even before Beeching. Here are also many places that have ever had a bus service, or at least a direct one. In my part of the world, for example, here has never been a bus service between Cricklade and Wootton Bassett, or between Malmesbury and Cricklade. People wanting to make journeys like these have always had a difficult time until private cars came along.

Furthermore, for the last 50 to 60 years this country in common with others has developed edge-of-town shopping malls which are almost totally reliant on the private car. Their growth, not exactly helped by local authorities introducing parking restrictions and imposing prohibitive business rate levels, has resulted in many High Streets no longer fulfilling their traditional function; if you want to buy a coffee or visit a charity shop – fine – if you want to buy a washing machine forget it...

Now we can wring our hands all  we like about how all this is “wrong” and how some ethereal “they” or other should do something about it, but as Walter Cronkite used to say ”That’s the way it is.”

Next time you have a chance, sit on a roadside bench and see who is driving by. The number of well-heeled driving gas guzzlers will be few. Most people will be like you or me, or what you or me used to be with a young family and a mortgage, who are now seeing gas, electricity, petrol and diesel prices going through the roof, inflation beginning to be noticeable in shops like it was in the bad old days.

Don’t bother telling them that they shouldn’t be driving because it harms the planet. They already know that – what they probably don’t know is where the money for the next electric bill is coming from, and right at this moment  they are worrying more about the latter than the former

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs springs to mind.

The way to help the working poor who struggle to pay for basics is in my view to increase the minimum wage and to reduce income tax and national insurance payable by those on the minimum wage.
I can not agree with reducing petrol duty as this only benefits those who drive and does not help those paying ever rising fares.

The way to help the not working poor is a general modest increase in benefits. I can not support reducing petrol duty for the same reasons as above.

At a time of rapidly increasing gas and oil prices, I doubt that the government can FULLY protect any sector of the population against such increases, but they can help a bit.

The era of cheap fossil fuels is over. And many people will have to make changes, including.
Walking or cycling instead of driving whenever possible.
When driving is unavoidable, drive carefully to save fuel.
Make fuel economy the first priority when buying a vehicle.
Do not overheat your home, no one in normal health needs a space temperature higher than 22 degrees, 16 degrees at night.

The living wage is rising by 6.6%, and the NI threshold is rising from £9,880 to £12,570 in July

... and the state pension and welfare benefits will rise by just 3.1%. Nowhere near matching the rise in the cost of living.

To an extent he has done this.  An individual on the National Living Wage working a 40 hour week earns £19,760 a year.  With tax and NI thresholds at £12,750 the tax and NI will cost £2,390 an effective rate of 12%.  I agree that any additional earnings will attract a marginal rate of 33%.

In my view, a larger increase should have been made.
I doubt that the government can FULLY protect any group against rapidly increasing world prices for fossil fuels, but they should in my view have gone a bit further than 3.1%

Unfortunately, the state pension and welfare benefit annual uplifts are linked to the Consumer Prices Index rate from the previous September.

That's not to say the Chancellor couldn't have done something for state pensioners and welfare benefit claimants. He chose not to help out some of the poorest and most vulnerable in society. And os rightly receiving opprobrium for that decision.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rishi-sunak-statement-benefits-tax-inflation-b2042410.html

The ill fated triple lock was abandoned this year as the wages index would have given us an 8% rise. Ironically just where we are with inflation now with the energy increase yet to factor in.

That it seems to be a surprise to some people that government money printing leads to inflation, or that money hosed around ad-lib to sustain lockdowns, furlough, rip-off protective clothing purchases and vaccination programmes comes with the need to pay for it, surprises me.  Maybe few foresaw Vlad doing what he's done in Ukraine, but surely all the consequences of the government's reaction to Rona were entirely predictable.  Not just this government, but governments all around the globe have been very free 'n easy with the money supply.  Seeds were sown in the wind, and now comes the whirlwind.

In my own enterprise, paper packaging materials, we are hugely impacted by the absence on world markets of Russian pulp.  But we were already experiencing big supply difficulties because of the explosion in home shopping and the demand for cardboard boxes that's gone with it.

Inflation and erosion of living standards are here to stay, for a bit.

Um, I realise printing money causing inflation is a classic economic theory, but the actual real economy is more complex than classical economic theory.

One of the more basic tenants of economic theory is that when demand for a product exceeds supply prices will rise. 

• In this case, the inflation seems to have been mainly caused by a jump in world oil and gas prices (these have almost immediate knock-ons in other areas such as fertiliser and transport as well as high energy industries. This increase started because production, which reduced during lockdowns has not being restored as fast as the recovery in demand (possibly deliberately by some producers looking to increase the prices) and more recently by the war in Ukraine, as Russia is one of the world's largest oil and gas producers.
• A rise in fertiliser prices is also due to the war, as Russia was one of the worlds major exporter of agricultural fertilisers. 
• There are also residual shortages of some other manufactured products due to lockdowns in various countries
• There are also market pressures to increase wages caused by a shortage of labour due to loss of a huge number of foreign workers over the last couple of years.

I heard the Chancellor announce the cut in fuel duty on the car radio, as I drove away from the filling station in Taunton. I cursed my luck at not having waited for a few more hours, when I could have saved about £1.65, although driving through Tiverton later, there seemed little fuel to had at any price.

When I got home, I found that the postman had been, and delivered my bus pass. Win some, lose some.

I’ve had a bus pass 9 months, haven’t used it yet.  Not sure if I could walk as far as the nearest bus route…  ;D

I wish I filled up before the announcement - fuel prices at every station I drove past jumped UP 6-7p.

I don't disagree about supply and demand.  In my own business, where we shift around 70 - 100 tonnes per week of paper-based packaging, we've noticed the effects of the energy price rises and shortage of raw material (with Russian pulp now excluded from the market in The West) very acutely.

I just felt it needed pointing out that there are always consequences when governments resort to conjuring fiat money out of thin air.  Those who thought the answer to Rona was to tell a sizeable chunk of the working population not to turn up at work for a few months and "the government" would pick up the tab and who imagined that the cost would somehow not fall on individuals and enterprises were forgetting that "the government" has no money, save what it removes from people presently alive and our children.

There's a handy free car park near my closest bus stop. I call it "hybrid" travel.

Today's rocket attack on the Saudi Oil facility in Jeddah is not going to help fuel prices.

https://www.skysports.com/f1/news/12433/12574973/f1-continuing-with-saudi-arabian-gp-as-planned-after-jeddah-attack (https://www.skysports.com/f1/news/12433/12574973/f1-continuing-with-saudi-arabian-gp-as-planned-after-jeddah-attack)

Edit: added link

The triple lock worked just fine until it was actually needed.

the problem with the triple lock is that it will always lag behind the actual inflation rate.  The 8% increase in wages was ignored this year because it was a recovery from the reduction of average earnings in the first year of covid.

By law, the old basic state pension & the new state pension are required to rise in line with incomes as a minimum every year. It wasn't the triple lock that was broken, which is just a policy, it would have been the law if it hadn't been set aside for 12 months by a new Act of Parliament. This shows that anything 'enshrined in law' can be dispensed with if inconvenient at the time as an existing law doesn't bind Parliament.

This whole debate hasn't really moved on since the oil price shock of 1973 following the Yom Kippur war.

At the time there were calls for houses to be better insulated,; it was predicted that car use would fall as costs rose and so on and so forth. In the event people adapted to the new prices and cars became more efficient (anyone remember the motor manufacturers emphasising the new low Cd values of their latest models...?) Building regulations have made the modern UK house much more energy efficient that the 1960s and 70s equivalents - why else does so much modern construction have such undersized fenestration?

For the last 100 years the new growth of towns and cities has been based on the use of the motor car and the organisation and spatial arrangements are largely no longer suitable for people to do most of their business within walking distance. Towns are now zoned for industrial or commercial or leisure or residential uses separating these various activities.

Without a fundamental re-organisation of built-up areas calls for people to walk or cycle more, or use the buses or trains (which for most towns up to about 100k inhabitants have little or no relevance for intra-town journeys anyway) will be ignored as these alternatives are simply not relevant for most people's transport needs.

A case in point. Until a way is found for the local corner store 10 minutes walk away can supply goods as cheaply as a supermarket 10 minutes drive away, the supermarket will continue to be preferred.

Cars are indeed more efficient than in 1970s, but more vehicles, driven for greater distances have resulted in increased petrol/diesel consumption. And of course road fuel is cheaper relative to wages, whereas fares have increased greatly.

Newly built homes are better insulated than was the norm in the 1970s but I suspect that heating the whole house to 24 degrees with cheap gas central heating has negated any savings. I can remember when most people only heated the room in use.
I also remember when people wore warm clothes in the winter, and used thick wool blankets on beds, with brushed cotton sheets. Some people even wore pajamas. Or long underwear.

And as for shopping, on line ordering and home delivery is probably the future for many people. Fuel is still used by the delivery vehicle, but probably less than used by each customer driving to the supermarket.
Electrically powered supermarket delivery vehicles will soon become the norm.

Can you remember from the same era how many people died of hypothermia?

And can you fremember the mould that built up in thode unheated rooms, and rhe resultant deaths from brochitis and pneumonia?

And can you remember how much plumbers earned after a cold snap repairing all those burst pipes?

Selective recollection is such a blessing...

Yes, but, I still only heat the room in use to 20+ degrees, heating other rooms only very slightly to prevent plumbing freezing.
And I use thick wool blankets, warm nightwear, and warm clothing.

I spent on fuel last year.

Electricity-------------£200
Logs-------------------£160.
 
Paraffin----------------£25.

I keep large stocks of LPG and of coal, and of candles, in case of emergencies but consumption of these is negligible.

Well...

My family has just spent the winter without central heating. No pipes burst, nothing went mouldy, and no-one died of bronchitis, hypothermia or indeed amnesia.

I won't bore you with the details of how this came about, but it was a temporary expedient.

What did we learn?

1. It is absolutely possible to be comfortable in a house that's a few degrees cooler. This may go some way to explaining how humans survived for the 300,000 years before central heating was invented.

2. Only heating the rooms you use can save a fortune. The heat that leaks out of them raises the temperature of the rest of the house just enough.

3. We found it was surprisingly good for family life. Our kids, who would normally skulk off to their rooms to do whatever teenagers do of an evening, actually joined us in the sitting room instead to keep warm. OK, they had their iPads and headphones, but they were present and they even spoke sometimes.

I also experienced neither mould, nor hypothermia, nor bronchitis, and no frozen pipes.
Not even during two prolonged power cuts.

I never lived in a house that had central heating until I was 35 years of age, but I did spend half a working lifetime working in the social housing industry so I have some experience of the problems, both social and structural, that come from unheated or poorly heated housing

Yes it is possible to live quite happily in an unheated house if you are young, fit and active or at least fit or active

The last known case of hypothermia that I personally came across was an old lady in Calne in 1986. In a bungalow that had Economy 7 heating that she couldn’t afford to run...

Not everybody is all right Jack.

Well, it depends on who you are - people vary a lot. And that's not how I see it.

I didn't live in a house with central heating or cavity walls until I was 42. And up to then I suffered chronic rhinitis and catarrgh, which then stopped quite suddenly. It was never possible to prove why, but my best guess was an allergy/reaction to mould spores (which persists, to some extent). So I suspect that it's the cavity walls that matter as much as the heating. It might just be the temperature, though some on those buildings were reasonably warm.

There is a serious problem in putting modern efficient, comfortable, heating into old houses. Houses were once heated by open fires, which needed a lot of air flow - aka howling draughts. This did, however, remove any moisture from the surface of the (solid) walls and generally provide fresh air. So even where damp-proof courses were put in, they didn't need to work very well.

Since we switched to other heat sources (closed fires, electric, radiators, etc.) and minimal ventilation for efficiency, all those houses have suffered from structural damp. Treating this is always difficult, and some houses just don't respond to any treatment. They just weren't built to unventilated. And I'm sure that mould - even if invisible - is a common consequence.

But returning to that high ventilation model was never was option for me - I don't do cold. I grew up in a house heated by coal fires, though with the later version with underfloor draught to the fires so the room could be better sealed. But the bedrooms were not heated, and clothes of the period were somewhat lacking compared to today's skiing kit - and I did not enjoy the chilblains at all, despite plenty of opportunity to get used to them. When we had snow it was fun - for a few minutes, but that didn't survive my fingers, toes, ears etc. starting to hurt.

And that has only got worse in the last few years, with Reynaud's and arthritis. I tried turning down the heating last autumn, but my fingers started to hurt with the thermometer still showing 20^o, and I'm not yet prepared to wear gloves sitting at the keyboard.

So, in that limited sense, roll on global warming!

https://youtu.be/VAdlkunflRs

 ;)

We have strayed a long way from railways on this thread, let alone the 5p off fuel subject line, but just for clarification I will put my Surveyor’s hat back on once again and give an explanation of damp and condensation, which are two totally different things.

A damp roof course in a building should be above ground level but below ground floor level, and is there to stop moisture migrating up from the ground. If there is no damp proof course in a building or if it has been breached, rising damp will be the result. It will be apparent through damp or wet walls, usually at a fairly low level in the building.

Penetrating damp is moisture that comes in through the walls. This is much more likely in buildings with solid walls but it can also happen with cavity walls, either through moisture jumping the cavity across dirty wall ties, or can sometimes occur when a building has had the cavity filled by using the insulation itself as the route. This should not happen unless the cavity wall insulation itself is faulty. It will manifest itself in a damp patch or patches on the internal wall

There is always moisture in the atmosphere, especially in temperate (ie wet) climates such as in the UK, and the warmer air is then the more moisture it can absorb. Condensation is the result of warm air meeting a cold surface where the moisture in the air will condense into water. This is the reason why moisture will be found on cold days, for example, on windows. Moisture will also condense more easily with poor air circulation, so it is more often seen behind furniture or in relatively unused rooms where the air is not regularly disturbed. Given time, either damp or condensation will result in mould growth

Condensation is not caused by a structural fault in the building; it is caused by the inability of the air in a building to hold the moisture in it. The cure for condensation is either to improve the ventilation or reduce the amount of moisture in the air. Improving ventilation is easy, by opening windows and possibly doors, but people are often reluctant to do this because of draughts, especially in cold weather, and also because it wastes expensive fuel. Reducing the moisture content is more difficult and will depend on where the moisture is coming from and how easy it is to reduce. It is not easy t all in kitchens and bathroom where there tends to be a lot of hot or boiling water around at certain times of day.

The easiest way to absolutely guarantee oneself a major condensation problem is to have an unvented heating appliance, such as a portable gas heater, in a draughtproofed room.

Condensation can also be reduced by use of an electric dehumidifier, these extract water from the room air into a container that must be emptied. Less commonly the water is piped to a drain.

Increasingly expensive electricity is consumed by the machine, but warmth is also produced, unlike opening a window.

Another option is mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, or MVHR, an electric fan extracts warm damp air from a kitchen or bathroom and uses a heat exchanger to warm incoming fresh air. Very effective and use little electricity.

Unflued heaters that burn paraffin or bottled gas can be most useful for emergencies or breakdowns, but regular use should be avoided for the reason given of the amount of moisture produced.
Such heaters USED TO BE a cheap option favoured by the poor, but these days are nearly as expensive as electricity. Handy for breakdowns though.
I have a portable LPG heater for emergencies, never been used other than for brief testing.
I also have a Tilley infra red radiator, used regularly in the bathroom in severe weather, and sometimes elsewhere.

Right.

As a youth, I lived on the moors 1000' above Oldham on the border with the West Riding of Yorkshire. The house (a shop actually, with living room, kitchen behind and bedrooms above) was a couple of hundred years old, built of stone, and heated by a single coal fire. There was a small paraffin heater in the outside toilet to stop the pipes freezing, and a bucket of water inside the back door for when it didn't work, plus a hammer for when the bucket froze. I was once lowered from the bedroom window to clear the snow from the front door when it drifted the wrong sort of way.

Strangely, it was on a warmish sunny day in April that I caught pneumonia...

Right.

I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah".

Luxury...

And you try telling the young people of today that and they won't believe you!....

I have not been believed by the youth of today when I told them that I remembered,

Working horses in suburban London.
Houses without electricity.
Outside toilets.
Oil lamps as a daily form of illumination.

And I did explain that none of the above were COMMON in the 1960s, but that all were still existing.

And a lot dont really believe more recent history such as as 56k dial up internet, or a world without cellphones, or blankets on beds rather than duvets, or beer at 25 pence a pint.

My Saturday job in 1971 was on an old fashioned forecourt on the A1 north of Newcastle, where we filled the car as requested, checked the oil, cleaned the windscreen etc.   Checking tyre pressures was worth a good tip.

I distinctly remember petrol being about (newly decimal) 32p a gallon, because drivers would sometimes pay with a pound note and ask me to keep the change.  Only the drivers of the very biggest cars might ask for £5 of petrol…

You must have been a southerner! I was pulling pints of bitter at that price in Leyland's Working Man's Club in 1978. 23p for mild and no ladies in the games room. Life on Mars.

You can guess the price of a pint of mixed - very popular there.

Trophy bitter was 25 pence in the "Jolly Anglers" pub, Wood Green, 1978. Mild, rare in London, was cheaper.
About 20 pence a pint in student union bar.
Cigarettes were about 50 pence a pack, I have never smoked but recall the price. 

Portsmouth 1968 Brickwoods Best Bitter 1s 8d (8.3p) a pint

I can still recall the price of a Toby Bitter in the Ferry Inn, Salcombe back in the summer of 1977..... 24p a pint, rising mid August to an unreasonable 25p.....outrageous!

I didn't know you'd been inside my adoptive paternal grandfather's house!