Oh, look who's arrived to waste some money
The government is trying to kill off the fast car with emissions based tax bands, but at the same time they’re wasting our money – or so the Tax Payers Alliance (TPA) has claimed.
After they found out about the government’s fleet of 110 hybrids they did a little maths and worked out that they’ve spent nearly £1million unnecessarily.
They say that changing the fleet to 1.4 litre Ford Focusses would have saved £880,000 of tax payers money.
After doing the sums, the TPA worked out that a Prius is £8,555 more than a Focus, while a hybrid Honda Civic is over the odds by £4,163.
The TPA’s Policy analyst, Matthew Sinclair, said: “The money would be better spent on planting trees. There’s only a marginal difference in carbon emissions saved from switching to hybrids. But trees breathe in 730kg of carbon dioxide over a lifetime.”
They say that the money saved by switching to Ford would save enough to buy 74,028 trees which could absorb (?) 54 million kilos of carbon dioxide.
Sinclair added: “You would have to drive a hybrid car nearly six million miles before the carbon saving would equal that achieved by planting these trees.”