BIG MONEY?

I am old enough (just) to remember when petrol can in at £1 for 3 gallons, and a little later £1 a gallon, we are now paying around £6.02 per gallon (no wonder they changed things so that you buy by the litre rather than the gallon). I can recall adults at the time saying that if it got any more expensive they would cut back on driving or give up their cars (obviously that never happened).

Personally I reached my own private peak oil last June and am lucky enough to be able to use some subsidised public transport to get to and from work. The car is a luxury largely reserved for the weekend. Just for the record the UK average price for a litre of petrol is around: 133.89 and for diesel its around 142.21.

That 133.89 per litre breaks down along the lines of:

• 47 pence for the basic cost of the fuel
• 57.95 pence flat rate duty
• 22.32 pence VAT
• 1.5 pence for the bio-fuel element
• 1.12 pence for the supplier
• 4 pence for the retailer

Considering that motorists in these isles use around 37.6 billion litres per year you can see that is big money. Everybody wins - the Oil companies get rich, the Government gets a handy chunk of tax, the middlemen get their share - save for the motorist and the haulage firms who pay through the nose again and again. Wales is one of the parts of the UK that is least prepared for the consequences of fuel shortages and Peak Oil.

We have a transport and delivery network that is almost entirely dependent on petrol and diesel to get things done and to put things on the shelves. We have a high percentage of people who commute by car from where they live to where they work and many of them travel considerable distances. Our public transport system is inadequate, we need a combination of trams and trains to get people to work (and back again), we need to look at electrifying our local rail lines and ensuring that they are fully integrated into the transport system.

We face a future where cheap fuel will be a thing of the past, so we need to ensure that all our communities have reasonable access to a reliable cheap system of integrated public transport, at the heart of which needs to be our long neglected rail network. The old excuses about a lack of funding, despite the banking related financial crisis, are no longer acceptable;

We in Wales make up around 5% of the population of the UK, and make significant contributions to the exchequer - so we need 5% of the UK transport spend, and full control of our transport planning and our transport budget.If Westminster wants to make the Union work then cough up the cash!