Did we simply help overseas manufacturing profit with the scrappage allowance?

Government scrappage scheme ends

Today sees the end of British taxpayers supporting car salesmen and car makers...
What will happen to the motortrade now the crutch has been pulled away?

Could we see the infamous banks rushing in and closing down all those involved in the supply chain within the automotive sector and could this be an example of the false bottom in the current credit crunch?

Good cars and good salesmanship was replaced with buying business or as the Government say "this scheme was designed to deliver a boost to the industry at a time when it needed it most, offering a £2,000 grant to scrap an old car in exchange for a new one. It has helped to create and maintain jobs in the industry and supply chain, while helping up to 400,000 customers to
buy a new car through scrappage."

For those that travel to visit developing nations capital cities you might wonder why our fairly clean burning and roadworthy cars got scrapped as we send our old spectacles or mobile phones to third world countries the question comes …. Should we have sent our roadworthy cars to replace the pollution creating wrecks driven around in the developing world?

We could have cleaned our air and improved that of capital cities around the world

1. Latest figures show this giveaway contributed to approximately one fifth (20%) of all new car registrations since the scheme started

2. Half (54%) of scrappage buyers surveyed had never bought a new car before

3. More than half (56%) of those surveyed said they would not have bought any vehicle at this time if the scrappage scheme had not been introduced

4. Cars bought through scrappage had average CO2 emissions of 133g/km – 27% lower than the average CO2 of scrapped cars

5. The average age of cars scrapped under the scheme is just over 13 years – 90% of all cars scrapped in the scheme were between 10 and 16 years old (SMMT)

6. Government data estimates that there may have been as many as 4,000 jobs supported by the scheme at manufacturers and suppliers across UK

7. Of those surveyed 60% of car owners who bought a new vehicle under the scheme were over 60 years old

Did we simply help overseas manufacturing profit from our customers and could we have spent this money making a new sector in wind, solar or other renewables.

I know thousands of smaller companies would have been kept in business if this money was used not as a gift but as a profit making loan that could be recycled back into business once repaid…

As the retail motortrade now sees the end of the boom (boom & bust) so sinks into a slump after we will see

Should we have worked on a theory

Give a man a fish and you feed him

for a day.

Teach a man to fish and you feed

him for a lifetime