APPENDIX 4
Letter from the Northern Ireland Affairs
Committee to HM Treasury
The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee is conducting
an equiry into the illegal sales of fuel oil in Northern Ireland
with the following terms of reference:
"To examine the sale of fuel oils in Northern
Ireland on which duty has not been paid and the effect of this
on the legal trade in fuel oils."
It has already received a memorandum from HM
Customs and Excise and an informal briefing on the problem in
Northern Ireland from the Collector there. The problem arises
partly from a combination of the differential in duty with the
Republic of Ireland and the currency differential. It is compounded
by the large number of border crossings from the Republic and
the lack of frontier controls inherent in the Single Market.
A differential in road fuel prices across national
borders within the EU, is not, of course unique to the island
of Ireland and I have therefore been asked to seek a paper from
the Treasury dealing with the following topics:
(i) a list of national borders within the
EU or forming part of its external frontiers across which there
are material differences of road fuel duty or road fuel retail
prices, giving the differences in each case and details of any
specified duty relief or rebate schemes operated in the frontier
areas and designed to reduce locally the impact of the cross-border
differential in retail prices. (The Committee understands that
such a scheme exists for filling stations in the Netherlands close
to the German border and that some road fuel users claim a partial
fuel duty rebate in France);
(ii) details of any restrictions in EU law
which have the effect of preventing the Government, if it wished
to do so, setting differential duty rates for particular areas
of the United Kingdom (such as Northern Ireland) and consequently
the basis for allowing any duty relief schemes of the type described
in the previous paragraph; and
(iii) an estimate, for each of the last five
years, of road fuel duty collected in respect of consumption in
Northern Ireland, broken down by type of fuel.
I should also be grateful if you could let me
know which Minister currently handles Customs and Excise matters.
29 January 1999
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