French transport minister Frédéric Cuvillier has this week demanded an update on preparations for a new compulsory road toll on lorries – known as écotaxe – that is officially scheduled to start in October.
Senior management at collection contractor Ecomouv’ were due to meet late last week and were widely expected to recommend a further postponement to January 2014.
According to French press reports, about 10,000 of the country’s 600,000 lorries have been registered over the summer, well short of official expectations.
Ecomouv’ is understood to be ready to ramp up call centre capacity to handle more telephone registrations, but even doubling the administration effort to be able to process 20,000 registrations a day would still require a volume of calls that has yet to materialise.
Registration is needed in order to issue an onboard écotaxe box, a device which communicates with roadside equipment and triggers payments of between €0.08 and €0.14 per kilometre on taxable road sections.
While the French government hopes to raise €1.2bn a year from lorry traffic on roads that were previously free to use, businesses in France are resisting a move that could potentially add between 5 per cent and 8 per cent to their transport bills.
Part of the opposition arises from the fact that while hauliers will be able to charge back écotaxe to customers loading the lorries, suppliers face an uphill struggle to recover the additional transport costs from clients.
While the French government has been collecting economic data on prices and margins in the food chain for some years now, it has yet to weaken the stranglehold multiple retailers have on the suppliers' share of the final retail ticket.
The écotaxe roadside equipment has been under live test now for some weeks, yet the real test will be whether or not it goes life while the current government remains in power.
Other EU member states are following the French experience closely, with a view to rolling out a similar lorry tax of their own.
