I am indebted to Times journalist Alice Thompson for revealing a cunning attraction of a taxpayer-funded Motability vehicle that frankly had never occurred to me.
She was in Gloucestershire last month and the minicab driver admitted to her he "sometimes" used his wife’s Motability car for work because it’s brand new and therefore doesn’t need to pay for its upkeep.
He said his wife was housebound with "chronic ADHD" which is why she would have been receiving personal independence payment (PIP) and out of that money had been able to fund the car.
If her attention deficit was so bad I am amazed she was allowed to drive a car but there we are. The minicab driver said he had got the idea of using the Motability car from another taxi driver.
So when you get into a minicab you may be paying twice - the fare and a portion of your taxes. Clearly a scandal.
It seems everybody is doing well out of Motability, with the notable exception of the taxpayer. The Department of Work and Pensions sends £2billion a year of your money to subsidise Motability with one in five new cars now being bought through the scheme.
Even the chief executive trousers £750,000-a-year with the previous CEO having been pushed out when it was discovered that he was taking home £1.7million.
Disgrace as minicab driver uses wife's PIP funded car to pick up passengers - Kelvin MacKenzie
GB News/Getty Images
Like most things the scheme started out with the best of intentions. In 1977 under the Jim Callaghan government it was introduced to ensure the properly disabled were not trapped in their homes and could get out to shops and friends.
In those days it was aimed at those suffering from conditions like cerebral palsy, Parkinson's and the like. Then came the pandemic explosion with all kinds of chancers claiming back pain, ADHD, post traumatic stress disorder, eczema, and being granted PIP payments of anywhere between £4K-£6K.
Today there are 815,000 people swanning round in these vehicles with not only the car price being subsidised but also thrown in is three named drivers receiving free insurance, free road tax, free RAC cover, free servicing, free tyre and windscreen repair and a charge point for an electric car.
I suspect you will furious to learn that the scheme is even being used for criminal purposes as Bernard and Ann McDonagh, who were caught doing a runner from a restaurant in Swansea last year used their Motability Ford Transit van as a getaway car.
Perhaps the McDonagh's would write to me and explain why they received that van in the first place since it’s hard to believe the disabled should be carted around in a Transit. Makes fools of us all.
I urge you to go on the Motability site where currently you can have the pick of 890 cars. The first caught my eye was a Dacia Spring where there was no down payment but would costs £60 a week out of the weekly mobility benefit.
If you are prepared to part with your entire weekly allowance of £75.75 you could move up to a Nisan Juke SUV, priced at £23,000. Or you could raid the bank and have delivered to your door a BMW i4 M Sport or a Mercedes CLA coupe both at £52,770.
Many car dealerships are being kept afloat by Motability.
Getty Images
I am told one reason no government has clamped down on the scheme is that many car dealerships have been kept afloat by Motability when consumer demand for new cars has been falling plus it provides a pipeline of 300,000 well-maintained secondhand cars a year.
Keeping car dealers afloat is no reason for the taxpayer to be taken for a ride.
In these difficult times we should do three things at once:
- We should tighten the criteria for the enhanced mobility allowance. No more ADHD sufferers. And if you have eczema hard luck but forget the Mercedes. That should save £1billion a year.
- The chief executive must take a pay cut from £750K to £300K. If he doesn’t like it then he can find another gravy train.
- Instead of these being three year leases they must move to five or seven years. Cars are no longer the rust buckets of ancient times and in any event if anything did go wrong the drivers get it fixed for nothing.
A decade ago the Labour MP John Mann (now Lord Mann) said "Motability is making too much money."
Our country is a lot more skint than it was ten years ago. We can no longer shrug our shoulders at the spiralling cost of benefits. Instead of Motability how about Affordability.
