Over at ConservativeHome they're spinning the line that "Green Taxes" such as those that might be recommended by the Gummer-Goldssmith review might hit the poorest hardest:

Green action mustn't punish the poor. Green taxation - like the congestion charge and VAT on domestic flights - can fall most heavily on the poorest.

Zac Goldsmith: Green taxes
must not appear to be the rich
telling the poor what
they cannot have!

According to our figures I think they need to look either at who would be most affected, or who they are calling the poorest. It would of course not surprise any of us to find that they don't really count the really poorest as poor, just the "lower middle classes" from whom they want some votes. But, if they do mean the lowest rungs of the British wealth ladder, then according to the line that Chris Huhne, Green Lib Dems and other have been pushing it is not in fact these people who would be most affected.

33% of households do not have access to a car. Most of these are the least well off households. If money from the congestion charge puts more into public transport these people gain. Similarly I very much doubt that the very poorest, if they travel terribly far at all, travel by air, internally or overseas. These are the "National Express" customers if anything. It would cost me more in time, money and effort to get to a cheap flight airport before flying as it would be to get a coach service to my destination. And on overseas flights, it is the well off and moderately well off who can afford to take multiple breaks a year. The European city weekend break several times a year is not the stuff of the Housing Benefit claimant (unless he's also an MEP I suppose).

However, they are right about one thing, yet fail to address it. Green taxes will hurt the poor the most if the poor are always driven to living on "marginal land". For it is they who, as well as having to keep up their housing costs, will have to commute because housing prices near where they work or socialize are unaffordable to them. Only Land Value Tax, as I wrote in one of my first ever blog posts, can change that and give people a real choice as to whether to live closer to work or commute with the attendant higher travel costs that green taxation will bring.

The Tories therefore, like all the other main parties including the Lib Dems, signally fail to address the biggest environmental tax issue of all - the taxation of location values.