Peter Mandelson flat wrong on scrappage incentives

cleangreencars.co.uk has found compelling evidence that Peter Mandelson is completely wrong about scrappage incentives, which could make a valuable contribution to cutting CO2 outputs.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, Peter Mandelson dismissed the German government's scrappage incentive as a failure. Now the German media has reported that telephone lines to the responsible department, The Federal Office of Economics and Export Control, have been jammed with 400,000 enquiries so far. The incentive offers €2,500 to anyone trading in a car over nine years old for a new model using a fund of €1.5 billion. There is now a concern that the whole fund could be exhausted within days - which would equate to 600,000 new car sales.

The German car industry reckons the scheme could reduce the average age of cars in Germany by one year, saving 2 million tones of CO2 per year. While this figure cannot automatically be used as a guide to potential savings in the UK, CleanGreenCars believes that a carefully targeted scrappage incentive could make a big environmental difference in the UK, as can be seen from the following calculation:

Average CO2 of a new car in 1998: 188g/km (source SMMT)

Assume a scrappage incentive only for cars that emit under 130 g/km of CO2 (the EU target figure for 2012)

Result: a minimum saving: 58 g/km of CO2 per car

Then assume average mileage of 13,000 km per year (source Department of Transport)

Result: a saving of 754 kg per car per year

Therefore, for every 100,000 extra new cars, there is a CO2 saving of at least 75,400 tonnes of CO2 per year, plus other environmental benefits as new cars have lower emissions of other pollutants.

"Now that Peter Mandelson's main objection to a scrappage scheme has been proved wrong, CleanGreenCars urges the UK government to take a fresh look at this idea. A scheme on the same scale as Germany would save at least 452,000 tonnes of CO2 every year - a significant benefit to the environment", said Jay Nagley, Publisher of cleangreencars.co.uk.