Zero-emission Buses and Air Quality in Sheffield

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Anthony Browne)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing this very important debate. I declare an interest: my sister lives in Sheffield, and I have visited her regularly for many decades. I certainly understand what the hon. Member means about all the hills. I have walked and driven up and down them, and I completely understand the challenges that Sheffield faces in comparison with many other cities.

As the hon. Member said at the beginning of his comments, the Government completely share the ambition to eliminate air pollution. It is toxic, particularly nitrous oxides; that is why we set up the clean air fund. There have been a whole range of different Government initiatives to work towards that. We are also under a legal requirement by court action to act as quickly as possible. We do not want to delay or wait for new technologies that may eventually be helpful; we want to act now. Part of that scheme was the clean air zone programme that applies across the UK for cities where nitrous oxides and other pollutants are above permitted levels. As the hon. Member mentioned, Sheffield was one of them. Sheffield launched its class C clean air zone on 27 February 2023.

[Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)]

Rother Valley borders Sheffield, and many of my constituents go to work and drive vans into the Sheffield clean air zone. They are being penalised and the clean air zone is adding more money on to their bills. There is also talk of a clean air zone, or ULEZ-style scheme, coming to Rotherham. Can the Minister assure me that clean air zones and ultra low emission zones will be introduced only in areas where there is a business case for them and where people want them? At the moment, people in Rother Valley are being hit by the clean air zone in Sheffield, and they are worried that a similar one will come to Rotherham as well.

[Anthony Browne]

That is a valid point. Clean air zones impose costs on people, but they are only necessary and only required where air pollution is above the legal limit. In those places, not only are we required to introduce them by law, but it is the right thing to do to reduce air pollution as quickly as possible. The clean air zones are temporary. They are there only while air pollution exceeds the permitted levels. Clean air zones are supported by the Government, but the design and structure of them, including which vehicles are included or excluded, and their funding are decided by local authorities. As a result, all the clean air zones in the country are variations on a theme. For example, ordinary cars are not included in the Sheffield scheme, but taxis are. It is different in other places.

Because of the need to act quickly, the Government introduced the retrofit programme. As the hon. Member for Sheffield Central mentioned, that has been troubled. I have been in this job for three weeks, and it has landed on my plate. As he says, it has not performed as we expected in real-world conditions. We are currently analysing exactly what the impact is and what the mitigations can be, and we will publish the results soon. I cannot release them now—we need to make exec decisions—but when we do, it will be within the framework of eliminating air pollution in Sheffield and other cities as quickly as possible, as we are legally required to do, and as is the right thing to do.

[Ian Paisley]

Sheffield has an application under ZEBRA 2. Those applications close at the end of December, I think. Does the Minister agree that something the Government could do is make sure that by the end of January, or the beginning of February at the very latest, those decisions are taken, the contract is offered, and we move on to ZEBRA 3 and get all of the £400 million spent on these carbon-zero buses?

[Anthony Browne]

I will come to the hon. Member’s point. The retrofitting programme was only ever going to be an interim scheme, because those were the buses we had at that moment. As basically all other hon. Members have said, the ultimate long-term ambition is to go to zero-emission buses, for reasons of both climate change and air pollution. In the national bus strategy in 2020, the Government committed to 4,000 zero-emission buses; 1,600 of them are on the road at the moment. We have been pushing that in a variety of ways. We are also committed to announcing a date for the phasing out of non-zero-emission buses, which will be done in the near future.

There are two schemes for zero-emission buses at the moment. First, there was ZEBRA 1, which provided £270 million of funding. The beneficiaries included Sheffield, which got four buses, which will start in January, and the South Yorkshire metropolitan area, which got 27 zero-emission buses. We then opened ZEBRA 2. I know that the hon. Member for Sheffield Central wrote to one of my predecessors expressing interest from Sheffield in that scheme, and that Sheffield has lodged expressions of interest, which is great. The deadline is 15 December. I cannot announce the results, because the applications are not in yet.

On the request from the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), we want to act as quickly as possible. I will certainly urge officials to announce the outcomes of the bid as quickly as possible because, as I said, we want to act quickly for reasons of both climate change and air pollution.

Various hon. Members mentioned hydrogen buses. The UK Government are technologically neutral: we have been very careful to try not to say that one technology will work and another technology will not, not least because we do not know how technology is going to progress. There are also very varying conditions, and one type of technology might be better in one situation compared with another.

The hon. Members for Sheffield Central and for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) mentioned hills and the challenges they pose for battery buses. For longer ranges—there are buses in rural areas that have to go far longer distances—hydrogen buses may turn out to be more suitable than battery buses. However, I know that battery technology is advancing very rapidly. If we compare the debate now with a few years ago and five years ago, certainly from a manufacturer’s point of view, there is a lot more emphasis on batteries as the ultimate solution, rather than hydrogen. The price of batteries has dropped by 90% since 2010 and the range is increasing by about 10% a year—it has increased by about 45% over the last four years. Hopefully, those technological improvements will continue and help us to decarbonise all forms of transport in cost-effective ways.

We are supporting hydrogen. There are various Government programmes supporting hydrogen buses. The Government provided £30 million to support the West Midlands Combined Authority’s scheme for hydrogen buses, which are about to be launched there. The ultra-low and low-emission bus fund is supporting 20 hydrogen buses in Liverpool, and there are other hydrogen buses elsewhere. We will carry on supporting that, because hydrogen could end up being the absolutely appropriate technology for certain situations.

[Mr Betts]

rose—

[Anthony Browne]

I was going to talk about the point that the hon. Member raised about ITM production, but I will give way.

[Mr Betts]

I hope that the Minister will respond to this point as well. Given that the Government want to be technology-neutral, they ought to explore hydrogen as well as simple battery buses. Would Sheffield not be a very good place to expand their understanding of how hydrogen buses can work, because of the topography and ITM Power, and to try to roll out more hydrogen buses in a fleet, to see whether that delivers what everyone wants?

--- Later in debate ---

[Anthony Browne]

The hon. Member makes a very valid point, which I will discuss with officials. I want to pick up on a point that he made earlier—

[Alexander Stafford]

rose—

[Anthony Browne]

I still have time, so I will give way.

[Alexander Stafford]

Further to what my Labour colleagues the hon. Members for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) and for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) said, we in Rother Valley would also like hydrogen buses, and we hope to join in. There is cross-party support for hydrogen buses in South Yorkshire. I hope the Minister takes that point away.

[Anthony Browne]

I am reading the message loud and clear: everyone in the room likes hydrogen buses. I will discuss them with officials.

On the point about ITM Power, I was very interested to hear about that production facility. Again, as a Government, we are very keen not just to procure buses and other vehicles from other countries, but to make them in the UK—such as with Wrightbus in Northern Ireland and Alexander Dennis in Falkirk, Scotland—and to produce the power as much as possible in the UK, whether it is hydrogen or electric batteries. In my three weeks in the job, I have been doing quite a lot of work on sustainable aviation fuels. We want to make them in the UK, and to look at the whole supply chain and the whole energy transition that we are going through.

This technological transition creates an awful lot of opportunities in different sectors, including hydrogen. I do not like the phrase “green jobs”, because it has become a bit of a cliché, but these are green jobs. They are real jobs, they really exist, and they are often highly skilled. I have been meeting many companies that are entering this sector or developing the new decarbonised transport sector, if we want to call it that, and there are huge opportunities. The more rapidly we develop as a country, the more we can use it as an opportunity internationally as well for exports. If we solve the problems with hydrogen buses, for example, and work out how to make them work, how to power them and so on, I am sure that there will be an export opportunity for UK plc as well.

I am ready to wrap up. This has been a really important debate, and I am very glad that the hon. Member for Sheffield Central managed to secure it. He made many valid points. We will be publishing the results of the bus retrofit programme shortly, in terms of looking at how we can mitigate it. If Sheffield has not applied for ZEBRA 2 and is interested, it knows what to do. The deadline is 15 December. I will press officials to announce the results as quickly as possible.

Question put and agreed to.