"Million cars are scrapped illegally"

Says The Metro.

1. There are extremes here - taking your old car to a local beauty spot, removing the number plates and torching it is obviously Not Acceptable; trying to comply with EU reg's is just as mad in the other direction. So somebody has to decide what a sensible minimum standard is.

2. Disposal has to be paid for. The best way of raising the money is a flat tax on new cars (or per ton weight, or something), as I have suggested before ...

3. ... which will hopefully encourage people to run their old cars for longer - don't forget that building a new car and scrapping the old one causes as much pollution as the new car (being, let's assume, more fuel efficient) saves in several years.

4. The MW government will of course scrap VAT post haste (15% of list price of a car, i.e. thousands of pounds), but how much will the 'disposal tax' have to be? From the article "... the End of Life Vehicle Recyclers Association, says authorised dealers are losing £200million a year - half the industry's value - to illegal merchants. The government's own estimates say only 900,000 of the 2million cars scrapped this year will have a certificate to prove they were disposed of legally", so that looks like about £200 per car (i.e. it costs £400 to do, but they get about £200 a ton for the scrap steel. So the 'disposal tax' would be about £100 per ton weight of the new car, a damn' sight less than VAT.

5. Enforcement is two-pronged, scrap dealers would fill in a form, the former owner sends off his copy to DVLA (he has to continue to pay RFL until he does, let's say) and Dept for The Enviroment goes round authorised scrapyards, and provided they seem to be complying by the rules (e.g. if they claim for 100 cars, the inspector has to be shown receipts for the onward sale of 150 tons of steel, payment to an authorised incinerator for removing 100 old batteries and so on), give them £200 for every car disposed of, cross-referenced to DVLA.

That's that fixed. Next.