White van man faces being clobbered by extra £200 tax bill if fuel duty is hiked

WHITE van man faces being clobbered by an extra £200 tax bill if fuel duty is hiked next year, shock research shows.

An eye-watering 12p could be whacked on the price of a litre of petrol and diesel from March next year if Jeremy Hunt scraps the fuel duty freeze.

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Plumbers, sparkies and other tradesmen who rely on their motor to get will end up forking out £202 a year if the rise goes ahead, Labour analysis found.

This is based on the average driver using their van to travel 17,500 miles in a year.

This is based on a van doing 43 miles to the gallon.

Campaigners, MPs and small businessmen have urged the Chancellor to back The Sun’s and The Sun on Sunday’s Keep It Down campaign and not to put fuel duty up.

One white van man, Dan Ware, said: “White van men like me are already paying through the nose without slapping us with extra charges. It won’t be long before they’ve bled us dry.

“We are really struggling with soaring petrol prices and insurance costs.

“It’s getting to the stage where I can’t afford to pay more.”

Tory MP Greg Smith agreed, saying: “It’s imperative of the government not to get in the way of hard working people making a living.”

Mr Smith also told the Chancellor to keep fuel duty frozen in the Spring Budget amid fears it may rise by 12p under current assumptions.

But Mr Hunt told LBC it is “wrong to assume that we are going to increase fuel duty because we have not made a decision on that”.

This post first appeared on thesun.co.uk