“There is no gas increase in the finance bill,” assures the Minister of the Budget

A little backpedaling or a simple tune-up? Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin said he was not “not favorable” to an increase in gas taxation on Saturday on TF1while the day before, the Minister of Ecological Transition and Energy Agnès Pannier-Runacher had said that the government was going to propose it via an amendment to the finance bill. Agnès Pannier-Runacher “said that there might be amendments on the increase in gas taxation”said Laurent Saint-Martin on Saturday. He observed that the finance bill presented this week “does not contain an increase in taxes on gas” and declared that he was not “not favorable” to this eventuality.

Friday during a press point, Agnès Pannier-Runacher indicated: “the challenge is also to work on brown niches through the increase in the automobile penalty, through the elimination of the reduced VAT rate of 5.5% on the installation of fossil fuel boilers and finally through government amendment, through an increase in taxation on plane tickets and gas”. “It is important to provide consistent price signals between carbon solutions and decarbonized solutions”she had justified.

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End of the tariff shield

“It is especially important to prevent public policies and public money from making carbon solutions less expensive than carbon-free solutions”added Agnès Pannier-Runacher, referring in particular to the increase in taxation of electricity, essentially decarbonized in France due to the importance of nuclear power. In its finance bill presented on Thursday, the government plans to increase electricity taxation to a level that allows “guarantee the consumer a 9% reduction in the regulated sales price in 2025 from February 1”.

It is counting on the drop in electricity costs on the markets to absorb the increase in the electricity tax, which will mark the exit from the tariff shield put in place during the energy crisis from the end of 2021 to contain the bills of French. “Why is the electricity tax increasing? Quite simply because it had returned to zero during the inflation crisis”said Laurent Saint-Martin on Saturday. “The State has protected our fellow citizens in the face of surges in energy prices (…) today with inflation falling below 2%, for our public finances, we must remove this shield”.