Currently a load of tax is generated at the fuel pumps and is a consumption tax.
With a move away from hydrocarbons (which is a good thing) that cash has to be recovered somehow. Fuel receipts were just under 28 billion last year in the UK.
How to do that with something you can plug into a domestic supply.
Only way really is another consumption tax with some form of logging.
The varying the rate between location and time of day is just pure social engineering. Trying to stop school runs and trying to spread traffic load out.
But that really that was just an excuse for this project. It could have been done with any global positioning system. Military users that required the accuracy really only France and UK and now the UK is gone.
Precision industrial users, I think the business projection are way way over the mark. In its conception in 2004 then yes it would have been ground breaking. These days DGPS is readily available, cheap and easy to use.
Ignoring the arguments about if the sats that are up there which were meant to be good for 20 years plus will have to be replaced inside 20% of the planned lifetime. The fixed running costs are estaimated at 750 million per year which I suspect along with all the other predictions on cost will more than likely end up in the region of 1 billion. So 5 euros for each car in Europe per year with UK gone.
So personally I am glad we are well away from it, it has a stink about it and political is overriding technical and business cases.
Should UK get a system of its own? Gut feeling no. Do I think if it does go for it that it will be cheaper and more useful for what UK wants, then yes.
Tech has come along way since 2004 more options and we can use the falconX to get stuff up instead of Araine which the EU is politically and contractually tied into using.
And the point about the security, apparently the security stuff does need license to be handed over to the project. It is black box tech there are multilayers some are changeable form the ground some are hard coded. I presume there is also back door keys for a final resort to reclaim the network. 2004 china was still involved and no talk about countries leaving the EU. With the current state of play of paper work it is highly unlikely legal terms were created for such an event. So its a complete minefield and while there is UK produced tech in the system they will never be confident it is secure.