SCRAP: Motorpoint vote
March 31st, 2009 by Richard Aucock
MOTORPOINT MD David Shelton is at the coalface of car dealing – and today he backs our Scrap Scheme Now campaign.
The boss of the successful car dealer group – which has five sites across the UK – says a survey his team carried out shows consumers are calling for action too.
Today, in an exclusive blog for Car Dealer Magazine, he tells us why he backs our Scrap Scheme Now campaign:
LAST month we did a survey of motorists to gauge their support for the proposed car scrappage system. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority supported it (along with ourselves).
Car retailing is going through a torrid time of late, and with a few exceptions such as Motorpoint, it doesn’t show much sign of turning around in the near future. Little wonder, then, that dealers embraced the idea, first muted by the SMMT, with open arms.
After all, the thinking behind the scheme is eminently sensible. You trade your old car for a cleaner, safer, cheaper newer one, and get a £2,000 grant in the process for your efforts. What could be simpler!
The issue, as always with Government, is when will it happen? We’ve been flooded with calls from customers asking about the grant and how they go about applying for it.
When we tell them the scheme is still at the ideas stage, the response is invariably the same: ‘We’ll wait, then, until a decision is made one way or another.’
Confusion, it seems, reigns supreme.
Lord Mandelson and the Bank of England need to stop pointing fingers at each other, and decide their course of action.
They were quick to come to the aid of the manufacturers, let us not forget, offering loans of over £1bn.
Now they need to show the same sense of urgency with dealers, or you are likely to find even more going to the wall – and with it, another wave of redundancies.
This isn’t to say that the scrappage scheme is the panacea to all the industry’s ills, but as has been shown across Europe, where the system has proved to be a runaway success, it is a step in the right direction.
That’s what dealers need right at this moment.
David Shelton, Managing Director, Motorpoint
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Tags: motorpoint, Scrappage
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