Should the UK introduce a mileage-based road tax for electric vehicles from April 2028?

The chamber's verdict on taxing electric miles was No by a comfortable margin, but the real story is who supplied the resistance. This was not the pensioners' revolt one might expect from a debate about motoring costs — it was drivers in their late twenties and early thirties, the demographic most likely to have just bought into an EV on the promise of cheaper running costs, who rejected the idea almost unanimously.

Gender told a similar if gentler story: men broke firmly against the tax while women were closer to split down the middle, hinting that the policy's fiercest opponents were those most personally exposed to a change in the economics of EV ownership, not those debating it in the abstract. Only the smallest cohort, four voters aged 16 to 24, went the other way entirely, though too few to weigh against the rest.

The result sits squarely on the fault line the Treasury has been trying to navigate since fuel duty began visibly eroding: how to fund the roads once the vehicles on them stop paying at the pump, without souring the incentive to go electric in the first place. This vote suggests that trade-off remains politically live rather than settled.

The floor's top Yes case put it plainly — "if you're on the road, you should pay for maintenance like the rest of us" — framing the tax as basic fairness with drivers of petrol cars. The most-respected No voice was less a rejection of the principle than a demand for detail, wanting to know "what is the proposed charge per mile" and whether business mileage allowances would keep pace.

A No that reads less like opposition to the principle than suspicion of the small print.