SIR – Another day, another daft Lib-Dem wheeze hits the headlines. This time it is their transport minister Norman Baker’s suggestion that it would help all round if Vehicle Excise Duty and Fuel Duty were replaced by road charging.

He says that the idea will be ‘revenue neutral’, but the cost to motorists will reflect more accurately their actual road use.

His idea seems superficially attractive, but in case he has forgotten, I would remind him that this happens already because you only pay tax on the fuel you use so the further you go the more you pay.

Mr Baker then goes on to suggest that charges would be assessed by black boxes which would tick over every time your car passes a charging point. That is the easy bit. What he does not explain is how ‘in car’ meter readings can be billed without an enormous and costly computerised bureaucracy to collect relatively trivial amounts from up to 35 million individual road users.

Brian Holmans, Langley Road, Bingley