Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Worthington and Baroness Randerson

Committee stage
Monday 12th December 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

I decided to table this amendment, because I felt that it was important to draw attention to what I and many in the transport sector see as the lack of leadership from the Government on this issue. It is important to bear in mind that the Government have seemingly very good targets on decarbonising the transport sector, but there is no detail on how we are going to get there. The path ahead is very vague.

Transport is the largest carbon-emitting sector in the UK. It is responsible for a quarter of CO₂ emissions globally. In the UK, the sector has reduced its emissions by only 3% since 1990. That stands in contrast with other sectors. There is a desperate need for leadership, because we are falling behind. The evidence is that we have to be halfway there by 2030 to reach the goals for 2050, but we do not have the plans, the policy or the path set out for us, and it is now a matter of great urgency.

One reason why emissions have not reduced is that although the technology has improved, the number of vehicles on the road has increased, as has the size of cars. Although they are more efficient kilo for kilo, if I can put it that way, they weigh more now and have a greater impact and emit greater amounts of carbon. I want to say briefly that we are talking about this in relation to carbon emissions, but it is, of course, a matter of health. It has a huge impact on our breathing and things like heart attacks, and so on. It is a matter of considerable importance in health.

A great deal is made about the move to electric vehicles, but only 2% of the vehicles on the roads so far are EVs. We are a very long way behind the leaders—countries such as Norway, where up to half of vehicles sold are EVs. My amendment refers specifically to hydrogen, and hydrogen is controversial. Of course, it must be green hydrogen. Even then, green hydrogen has disadvantages, but the advantage of hydrogen is that it provides an early answer to the difficult-to-decarbonise sectors of the transport world—that is, heavy goods vehicles, heavy vehicles generally and, of course, shipping, which is particularly difficult to decarbonise. That is one reason why there is the reference to hydrogen.

The other reason why there is a reference to hydrogen is that, unlike with electricity for vehicles, hydrogen cannot really be installed on a commercial basis unless the Government put in place a set of carrots and sticks to encourage it commercially to be installed. It costs over £1 million to install a hydrogen-fuelling point. It is not the answer for ordinary domestic cars. It could be the answer for fleets of vehicles such as vans, but it is not going to be, unless the Government provide leadership.

I have been raising this issue for the past six years at least, and the Government have said that the market will solve the problem of electric vehicle charging points. To a certain extent, the market has stepped in. Of course, there are huge gaps, but the market has stepped in. The reason it has been able to is that all around us there is electricity—but we do not have hydrogen all around us. I deliberately mention hydrogen in the amendment because the Government need to consider how they are going to lead on this issue.

I finish by saying that the point of the amendment is to open up the matter for discussion and to give the Government the opportunity to consider—and, I hope, to think again about—the urgent need for leadership in setting out a set of steps, a policy or plan. These exist in other countries without Governments taking a huge commercial risk, but simply by providing the incentives to encourage people to choose more environmentally friendly ways of fuelling their vehicles and ensuring that, having chosen a more environmentally friendly vehicle, they can run it efficiently and effectively.

Noble Lords will be well aware that every time we talk about electric vehicles, there is immediately a discussion of the latest crisis that someone has faced in being unable to charge their EV—despite the fact that they are probably running short of electricity outside a house or fuel station that is blazing in electricity. Let us just think about how much more complex the matter is if we are talking about hydrogen.

This is about discussing the difficult issues and encouraging the Government to look ahead and plan—urgently—for what must be achieved. The average life of vehicles on the roads now is 16 years, I believe, and that will probably get longer because we are facing a period of difficulty, austerity and rising prices. This is therefore important, because those decisions made this year about what vehicle to buy—whether you are an individual or as a company—will be with us for decades to come. The Government must lead in the way only Governments can. I beg to move.

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 124A, as presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. I must say that it is seldom that we disagree, because we both share the objectives of a rapid response to the growing climate risk, rapid decarbonisation and increasing the efficiency of our energy systems. I welcome this chance to have a debate about the intersectionality between transport and energy. In fact, and not to pre-empt it, I have an Oral Question later this week about how departments connect on these issues. It is hugely important that the DfT, in particular, teams up with BEIS on planning for our future decarbonised energy systems.

That said, I do not think it will come as any surprise that I am absolutely opposed to the idea of bringing in this set of amendments as currently drafted. My belief is that hydrogen will have a very limited role, for three reasons. First, it is itself a climate change gas and it is very slippery; it is the smallest molecule on the periodic table and it escapes everywhere. I do not wish to have hydrogen all around me—quite the opposite. I want hydrogen in very controlled places, being looked after by industrial chemists; I do not want it in my home or in my vehicle. We just have to look at the explosion of the hydrogen fuelling station in Norway. It is often forgotten but this is a hugely explosive gas. Norway managed to blow one of its fuelling stations and, if Norway can blow things up, anyone can.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Baroness Worthington and Baroness Randerson

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that explanation. For the information of those listening, the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, and I attempted to lay an amendment to clarify the issue of service areas, or car parks as they might be called. However, according to the rules of the House that was not possible at Third Reading, so there is no amendment from us. But there is still a question in my mind: how do the Government envisage the strategy and policy, going forward? As I mentioned the last time we discussed this, if you go to a service area on a motorway you get your electric charging near the café—very often hundreds of feet from the fuel station—but that does not appear to be what is in the Government’s mind in relation to other service areas. I would like to know what the Government’s strategy is on this. I am sorry to be raising such a detail at Third Reading but we really only talked about this on Report. I still do not have a real understanding of why the Government are not considering having regulations in relation to the car parks associated with service areas, rather than just the fuel stations.

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for her introduction of these amendments. They are very helpful; they clarify the position and make the Bill much more useful. In Committee we debated the fact that this is a very narrow power being taken in relation to the infrastructure necessary to facilitate a greater uptake of electric and zero-emission vehicles. It is important that we look carefully at what more can be done to encourage everybody, at all levels of government—whether national, metro mayor or indeed at borough level—to take stock and introduce an effective network of chargers, which can help people to be confident that they will be able to use electric vehicles in a way that matches their current vehicle use.

I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, in asking: can we hear a little more from the Government, specifically about car parks but about destination charging in general? I feel that it is a little too laissez-faire to think that this will all happen through market forces. There are going to be times when we will need to take a strategic look at this in a specific geographical region. We need to have sufficient powers to enable us to make this infrastructure happen; we will otherwise not see the uptake that we need to hit our air-quality and climate-change targets.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Baroness Worthington and Baroness Randerson

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, this amendment follows on very neatly from a reference in government Amendment 13 about the,

“performance, maintenance and availability of public charging or refuelling points”.

The point was made several times in previous debates that having no charging point at all is possibly less frustrating than getting to one that does not work. I am moving on to an issue that I have raised before, which is that once you have installed a charging point it needs to stay there. Since the Government appear to have accepted the principle that planning legislation will be able to take into account the provision of charging points, we need reassurance that it will also take into account that permission will be needed to remove charging points.

I am not dreaming up an obstacle out of the blue, for the sake of it. I have already come across this issue locally to where I live, where a charging point was installed and then there were moves to remove it to change the configuration of a car park. Local residents raised the issue and ran a campaign to keep that charging point there. We cannot expect that always to work. I suggest that this is a good opportunity for the Minister to say publicly that the Government intend to deal with this issue in the regulations.

I should have made it absolutely clear that Amendment 18 looks at the provision of charging points in non-residential premises. Amendment 20 looks at the requirement for charging and refuelling points in new developments. Once again, I draw the analogy with parking spaces. It is quite normal for planning permission to say that you must provide a parking space; if you are building a block of flats, you have to provide at least six parking spaces, for instance. You also need permission if you wish to remove those parking spaces.

My amendment suggests that there should be a requirement in the regulations that new residential, commercial and industrial developments should include charging or refuelling points in the same way as they would require parking spaces. However, I have an eye to being reasonable. There will, of course, be situations where requiring this would be inappropriate, or make the development not viable. The suggestion made by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, of ducting as a possible preparation for this, deals with that issue. We clearly also need some kind of standard approach to such a requirement, in the same way as to the provision of parking spaces. It would be useful if the Government were able to clarify whether they intend to address these specific issues in the regulations. Only with the provision of charging points in a variety of situations, and refuelling points where appropriate, will we deal with the issue just raised by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. The public have to have confidence in a widespread supply of places to recharge or refuel their cars. I beg to move.

[Baroness Worthington]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 19, 34 and 35 in my name. I am retabling amendments discussed in Committee relating to the changes to planning necessary to enable the huge change in our transport infrastructure which the Government have stated they wish to happen. The scale of this challenge is quite daunting. I fully support the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who said that we need to embrace positive regulation in this instance. The natural pace of things is far too slow at the moment. If we look at what has happened in other sectors of the economy, the power sector in particular has a very good story to tell about changing our outdated structure to a modern one. That did not happen by accident: it came about through a succession of policy instruments which the Government tabled. The transport industry has been left largely alone in the last 20 to 25 years and it has delivered virtually no change, except perhaps for more diesel on the road. We have to see some interventions that will cause this industry to embrace the scale of the necessary changes. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. I am sure that she has been consulting colleagues in the DCMS about what needs to be done in planning. I suspect the answer will be that there will be something in the zero-emission vehicles strategy—I hope so.

Amendment 19 introduces the equivalent of code rights for the installation of charging infrastructure, similar to that in the Digital Economy Act 2017. We have had a number of years of development in digital telecommunications that have justified that. I suspect that we will quite soon find ourselves in a similar position with this. We have looked for evidence that we need this now. I have to admit that it is thin on the ground, but I suspect that we will be back discussing this again before too long. I look forward to the Minister’s response on that. Amendment 34 is another big topic relating to the rights of leaseholders and what they can and cannot request of landlords. We discussed this in Committee, so I will not dwell on it for too long. I have heard that there is a Law Commission inquiry on leaseholds, but that will not report until 2021—rather a long time to wait to resolve this issue when there are people who want the power today to install and pay for charging infrastructure in their properties but whose landlords are obstacles. We need a resolution of this sooner than 2021.

Amendment 35 is similar to that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, on the need to address the issue of non-residential buildings and to make them ready for charging infrastructure. It is crucial to say that non-residential is not covered in the National Planning Policy Framework, while residential buildings are covered. I hope to hear from the Minister what might be done to address that anomaly. It is clear that we will save ourselves money if we think about this earlier rather than later. It is always harder to retrofit rather than install at the time of build. I very much look forward to hearing from the Minister.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Baroness Worthington and Baroness Randerson

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 17th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments in this group in my name. I cannot see much of a theme between them so I will deal with them separately.

Amendment 95 addresses the issue of smart meters. We all know that smart meters are in the Bill because the Government believe, or have reason to believe, that there could be issues with pressure on the national grid. They are dealing with, or planning to deal with, that pressure through the use of smart meters. My amendment intends to ensure that smart meters really are smart, and very sophisticated. When we have talked about them before, people have said, “It’s really important to charge at night when there is not great pressure on the grid”. In fact—my amendment deals with this—specific groups of people have very good reasons for not charging at night. Some people cannot charge then because they are out at work and have taken their car with them, and some people, such as people with solar panels—I declare an interest because I have them on my house—have a good reason to charge during the day. I am keen to charge my car during the day, whenever possible, because that is when my panels are generating electricity.

I am probing the Minister to find out the Government’s view on this and whether the concept of smart meters can now take that kind of thing into account. It would be frightfully unfair if night shift workers, such as NHS workers, had to pay a higher price for their electricity just because they have to charge their cars during the day. I would hope that we had moved on a long way, technologically, from the days when night storage heaters imposed a blanket situation where you charged at night, dispelled your heat during the day—whether you were there or not—and had no control.

The national grid has assured us that there is enough overall capacity, but I fear that it is similar to the mobile phone companies saying that 95% of the population has a good signal. We all know that 5% of the population lives in a large geographical area known as the countryside, so there are great swathes of the country where mobile phone signal is very poor. Already, the national grid is overreaching full capacity in some areas such as south-east England and many rural areas because there are no links with the grid.

Amendment 103 is intended simply to make sure that the regulations that spring from the Bill are dealt with in the appropriate manner. I have tried to reflect the views of the DPRRC that there should be some affirmative resolutions.

Amendment 68 refers to the need for consultation with fuel retailers. Here, I am probing the issue of the definition, and how the Government will reach a definition, of “large fuel retailers”. The Association of Convenience Stores was rather worried that it would be forced to have electric charge points in inappropriate places. My view is that fuel retailers need to look 10 years ahead. If this revolution has taken place, they will not be selling loads of diesel in even five years’ time, nor loads of petrol. They need to think about how they will diversify. Consultation would help not just to produce good regulations, but to raise awareness among fuel retailers that they will need to consider the future.

When the consultation takes place it will also be important to consider the capacity of the grid. We have talked a lot about motorway service stations. They generally have an electric charging point. In the great and glorious future we hope they will have several electric charging points, but they are usually in the countryside. It might be that the grid does not have the capacity for that in that area. Things such as consultation would help to unravel that spectrum of things and make it clearer for the Government, as well as for those who have to supply the electricity.

Very briefly, Amendment 87, which I have added my name to, relates to data. I will leave the issue of data largely to the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, has spoken already, but I am seriously concerned that this is yet another gaping hole in the Bill. We dealt with it in Part 1 on automated vehicles, but electric vehicles have the same data-collection capacity. There are serious issues that the Government need to grapple with to reassure the public that the data being collected about their movements is dealt with responsibly and not used just as an easy marketing gambit.

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to the amendments in my name in this group. Consulting the sector, particularly the charge point providers and operators, is essential to ensure that the regulations we pass are fit for purpose. I am sure that that will be a component of the Government’s strategy, which we wait to see published. I look forward to hearing more about that from the Minister.

Amendment 87, which the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, mentioned, concerns a huge topic on data from electric vehicles. It is correct that we touched on it under the part of the Bill on automatic vehicles, but it is not present in this part. It would be good if the Government took this away and had a think about it. As a driver of an electric vehicle I often override the question at the start that says, “Do you want to send your data to the company that owns the car?”, simply because I think, “Why should I share it?”. However, there might be very good reasons why you want to share anonymised data to facilitate completely different ways of taxing people’s use of the vehicles.

In the Bill and certainly in the Government’s strategy we have to think about what will happen to the public purse when we move away from a transport system fed by fossil fuels, which generate huge amounts of revenue to the Treasury. As we come off that and go on to electricity we will not see the same revenues at all. Yet there might well be embedded into these technologies a new data source that would enable a different form of taxation based on road use. If we can come up with a taxation system that uses this data, perhaps on an annualised basis rather than the Government tracking your every move, we would be able to use it to inform a new form of taxation similar to the way we do an MoT at the end of the year, so you can pay taxes on that basis. There is an enabling aspect of the data as much as there is concern about privacy and use of data for purposes we were not aware of when we signed on the dotted line for different services.

This is a big topic. We probably cannot do it justice with just this amendment, but I will genuinely listen to and be very interested to hear from the Government about this topic and what they plan to do about it in the protective sense, but also in the use of it in creative ways to ensure we still collect revenue to fund our public services.