The never-ending fuel duty story

One other point worth noting from today’s IFS post-Budget briefing was the way the government has dealt with fuel duty over the past few years. Here’s a table showing how things have worked out in Budgets and Autumn Statements:

So now there isn’t another fuel duty increase until September 2014. But when I spoke to Robert Halfon yesterday, he seemed pretty content to let the government off from now on, given they’ve ‘done more than any other government in the last 10 years on this issue’. But as the Treasury Select Committee argued after the Autumn Statement, a medium-term strategy for fuel duty would make a great deal more sense, even if it prevented Chancellors in future years from producing a rabbit out of their hat for worried backbenchers. We didn’t see that in this Budget, though.