Ignition Point: Britain is building a two-tier motoring economy

There was a time when a van was just a van. A bloke bought one, filled it with tools, drove to work, swore at traffic cones and hoped the MOT man was in a good mood. Simple.

Now, apparently, to own a commercial vehicle in Britain you need the strategic planning capabilities of NATO, the cash reserves of a hedge fund and a working knowledge of lithium ion chemistry.

Somewhere along the line the people running this country decided the easiest way to save the planet was to make life incomprehensibly complicated for anyone who actually works for a living.

And the truly astonishing part is that the burden is not falling equally.

Large corporations are absolutely fine. In fact, many of them are laughing. If you are a giant national company with accountants, tax advisers, fleet consultants, charging depots and sustainability officers called Tarquin, the electric revolution is manageable. You install chargers, lease a few hundred vans, put out a press release with a photograph of somebody in a fleece pointing at a cable and call it progress.

But if you are Dave with two Transit vans in Doncaster running a plumbing business, things look rather different.

Dave’s office is the front seat. His finance department is his wife with a calculator and a migraine.

He is being hit from every direction at once. The vans cost more. Insurance costs more. Electricity costs more than anyone promised.

Public charging resembles a dystopian game show in which every machine is broken, occupied or hidden behind a Costa Coffee. And then, just for fun, the tax rules change every six minutes.

This is what nobody in Government seems to understand. A fleet vehicle is not a fashion accessory or a moral statement. It is not a LinkedIn post. For thousands of small businesses it is the thing that makes money happen. Take the vehicle away and the business dies.

Yet policy after policy now seems designed around the assumption that every company in Britain has a dedicated fleet department and a corporate Amex card. They do not. Most businesses are small. Most fleets are tiny. Most operators cannot absorb a forty grand experiment because a minister in Westminster wants applause at a climate summit.

And here is the maddening part. The people being punished hardest are often the ones with the smallest environmental footprint to begin with. A local electrician with one van covering twenty miles a day is being squeezed harder than multinational giants flying executives around Europe to discuss sustainable mobility transformation. It is complete madness.

Britain is quietly creating a two tier motoring economy. One tier is for corporations who can game the tax system, absorb transition costs and install chargers by the hundred. The other is for ordinary working businesses expected to carry all the risk themselves.

Once you notice it you see it everywhere. Clean air zones. Parking restrictions. Charging infrastructure. Tax incentives. Company car schemes.

The entire system increasingly rewards scale and punishes independence, which is ironic because small business owners are supposedly the backbone of Britain right up until the moment they need somewhere to charge a van in Wolverhampton. Then they are on their own.

Now let me be clear. Electric vehicles are not the problem. Some are excellent. The instant torque is brilliant, they are quiet and cheap to run when charged properly and for many fleets they make perfect sense.

But this transition has been designed by people who think everybody lives in a detached house with a driveway, three phase power and an Ocado addiction. They have never tried running a roofing company from a semi detached house while searching for a functioning rapid charger at half past six on a Tuesday night in the rain.

That is the reality. And until policymakers grasp it, Britain will continue drifting toward a deeply unfair system where the biggest firms thrive while smaller operators get buried under costs, complexity and bureaucratic nonsense.

Which is dangerous because small businesses are not just economic units. They are the texture of Britain. They are the vans on the motorway at dawn, the bloke fixing your boiler, the woman delivering flowers, the carpenter, the caterer, the courier. They are the people who actually keep the lights on while everyone else argues on Zoom.

Ignore them long enough and eventually they stop buying vans, stop hiring staff and stop growing. At which point Westminster will no doubt commission a report asking why British productivity has collapsed.

Adrian Simpson is editor at large at Business Motoring

Ignition Point: Britain is building a two-tier motoring economy

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