Britain can’t afford to drive – but can’t afford not to, either
Happy New Year: 2024 is the year of the £6 pint – up from £3.10 years ago. And if you think that’s a bleak milestone, the price of car insurance is even more extraordinary. The average British policy now costs £995, or about a grand. Insuring yourself to drive a car in 2013 cost an average of £644, which means that the price of policies has comfortably outstripped earnings and purchasing power.
That 54 per cent rise over a decade is a huge burden affecting the increasing proportion of the UK’s driving population (around half the country), and news that insurance premiums are rising yet again will come as no surprise to beleaguered motorists. But obviously, insurance isn’t the only cost rising.
For a start, the cost of buying a car is ridiculous – the new Golf costs £26,000 and a Citroen Berlingo costs £31,000. And that’s before you start looking at more upmarket cars, like the Volvo XC90, which comes with a £60,000 price tag before options.
Meanwhile, the bottom end of the used market is unrecognisable, with prices for a 10-year-old hatchback rising from £1,748 to £5,547 since 2013 according to Auto Trader. There’s no such thing as a cheap used car anymore, which is terrible news for new drivers.
Then there’s the cost of petrol, which remains both volatile and annoyingly high; due to the way we’ve organised civilisation, a war many thousands of miles away has a direct and palpable effect on the cost of your commute. Taxing the car will cost you more than you expect, and even EV owners are about to lose their free VED next year. And of course, due to global supply chain issues and a shortage of labour, fixing and maintaining cars is more expensive, which is partly what’s causing all these insurance problems anyway.
“The cost of repairs and replacement parts has increased, meaning that insurers are therefore experiencing more expensive claims costs,” explains insurance expert Tom Banks from GoCompare. “Consequently, the cost of drivers’ premiums has gone up.”
Spare a thought in particular for the buyers of electric cars, who are suffering the most from the car insurance crisis. The high and occasionally unbelievable cost of repairing even small problems with electric cars is allegedly making insurers wary. In much the same way that drivers who were once chivvied towards diesel ultimately found themselves penalised for so doing, environment-conscious EV owners are bearing the brunt of this latest fiasco.
Ultimately, though, the astronomical and ever-increasing cost of getting and staying on the road is a bigger problem than anyone is giving it credit for.
Driving is hard-baked into the very fabric of the British Isles. But a century of car-centric planning has left us with little else – our railways are failing, our bus routes are unrecognisable compared with just 10 years ago. Poor public transport investment has predictably forced the nation into its cars; for most of the country, driving is the only reasonable way of getting around.
That’s why around one in six British adults drives a car every day, and around 30 million of us drive once or twice a week, according to YouGov. Unless you live within walking distance of your workplace, your family, your children’s school and your entire social and cultural life, you need a car. Which is why the soaring cost of driving is obliterating the financial health of British families.
None of this particularly affects me. I live in London, with two bicycles, no children, and easy access to one of the world’s most comprehensive public transport networks. Occasionally, I’ll cycle to the zero-waste shop to refill a Kilner jar with split peas, totally unironically; most of my friends who work “in media” live within 10 miles of me and are the same. We’re not the ones most affected by the ever-increasing cost of driving.
Which goes some way to explain the dismissive, occasionally sneering coverage that these issues face from city-dwelling environmentalists, who (like me) largely use public transport or cycle and who (like me) vaguely consider the car to be a problem rather than a solution.
It’s so easy to talk about all 30 million car drivers as the enemy – evil and self-indulgent polluters who enjoy nothing more than recreationally buying hydrocarbons and paying for wheel alignment. Anyone who complains about the cost of driving should simply stop doing so – like me and my enlightened friends – and buy a bicycle.
But that’s not a particularly realistic response to the growing inequality on British roads, or to the fact that young people simply can’t afford to drive anymore. According to Compare the Market, a third of drivers say they’ll need to take on debts to keep driving, which in many cases is a prerequisite for keeping a job or having your children in their preferred school.
Rather than being another whimsical story about the long-awaited death of the automobile, it’s a set of social problems already beginning to unfold – that large areas of the country are only accessible by means of an increasingly unaffordable mode of transport; that housing built far from trains or buses puts burdensome financial pressure on its occupants.
People are being forced out of their cars without having anywhere else to go.
