Joy Morrissey

“It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), who eloquently championed his local area and covered every point that we could possibly raise—I shall follow humbly on his coat-tails. Fuel duty is a war on the motorist. It is an attack on hard-working families who have scrimped and saved to drive their child to that special holiday or even to do the school run each day. This tax is regressive. It will hurt normal, hard-working families across Beaconsfield, Marlow and the south Bucks villages. It will also hurt small and medium-sized enterprises, care workers and all the key workers who have to drive from outside Buckinghamshire to work in the area. We have care workers who come from other counties to work in Bourne End, Wooburn and Marlow because the cost of living is so high. That extra driving, that extra cost on their transport, will be devastating to our local care-working community and to those who provide vital services, such as our firefighters and police officers, who often have to drive to the fire station or police station where they are based. That extra cost is the difference between a family making it each month and slightly going under. That is who we are speaking for today: the people who are paying their taxes, working hard and wanting to do the right thing but are being punished by this fuel duty increase. My constituency is also impacted by rises in off-grid heating oil prices. I myself have off-grid heating oil, and many of my constituents in Dorney, Wooburn, Bourne End, Flackwell Heath and Iver are impacted by price increases. Although we are near London, we are actually very rural. I have more pensioners per capita than pretty much anywhere else—you might be the No. 1 winner, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I would come second. This extra cost will push my pensioners into poverty. They are barely making ends meet right now. They are humbly going about their business, but they all need transport as well. We have poor transport links so people need to use their cars, and my pensioners will be adversely affected by this fuel duty increase. It is incredibly unfair that the increase is coming in now given that world events are causing oil prices to increase anyway, so families, workers and the taxpayer will be further punished. It would be hard to have this debate without mentioning my right hon. Friend the former Member for Harlow, Robert Halfon, who led the charge on fuel duty. For years, he was the passionate voice making this point clear across the House: high fuel duty taxes are regressive because they affect working people the most. They are a brake on economic growth. We all saw the golden moment on Sunday morning when the harsh inconvenience of the facts hit the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero: that 38% of the cost of petrol is down to fuel duty, a tax entirely in the hands of the Government. This Secretary of State, who could power the entire country with hot air, seemed to get the message slowly but surely, and there is no problem to which the answer is not a faster and more ruinous race to net zero, putting ideology ahead of working families. To govern is to choose, and this Government always choose the most damaging economic pathway for families.”