Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lucas

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

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, I wanted to concentrate my remarks on the final group of amendments, but I will intervene briefly on this one. We should be told—perhaps I could have the Minister’s attention—who is actually objecting. We have just been told that local authorities may have concerns, but are private companies, petrol companies or garages objecting? In this particular area, somewhere along the line, there is a blockage. Can we be told whom officials are meeting? What is being said at these meetings? What is blocking this change? Clearly, there is a lot of support across the House for the amendment moved by the noble Baroness.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, Clause 10 seems a crucial part of the Bill. We absolutely need a widely available, dense network of charging points if we are to get people to move to electric vehicles. If the Government want to discourage diesel vehicles, making diesel available only at motorway service stations would be a pretty good way of doing it. It is clear that what is in the Bill at the moment is vastly inadequate. For large parts of the country, motorways are irrelevant. I include my home town of Eastbourne in that; I do not think that I use the motorway from one end of the year to another. By and large, petrol retailers are small and specialised.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, pointed out, these charging points are not in the petrol station parts of motorway service stations. They are in the parking bits associated with all the things you can do for 30 minutes while you wait for your car to re-charge. You do not want to sit next to a petrol pump for 30 minutes. You want to be doing something—at a sports club or a nail bar, or whatever it is that you are going to fill the time with. It is at these big car parks, which are associated with something you can do for 30 minutes, that we ought to insist on charge points. We should insist not because it is in some way disadvantageous to these places to put them in but because, as my noble friend Lord Deben pointed out, some people are being remarkably slow—probably because there are not many electric vehicles around at the moment—to see the advantage of being at the front of the wave in putting in charging points. It is at these big car parks around the country—there are some of them near all of us—that we have to insist on charging points. That is what will make the difference to the take-up of electric vehicles.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, Clause 12(1) states:

“Regulations may make provision for the purpose of ensuring the ongoing transmission of charge point data to a prescribed person or to persons of a prescribed description”.


Amendment 41 would insert the following:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may not impose requirements on owners or occupiers of domestic premises”.


There is a big hole in the Bill. I want to know where the Government will raise their revenue from when fuel duty is reduced. At the moment we raise £28 billion per annum. Over a period of years, as the use of electric vehicles increases, there will be a revenue loss. At the moment, the duty on petrol is nearly 60p a litre, on LPG it is nearly 32p, on natural gas it is 25p, and on diesel it is roughly the same as petrol.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has expressed concern about this. Its view is that revenue will come through road pricing, which I think some people call “spy in the sky”. This whole question of road pricing has always worried me. However, there are other forms of raising the revenue. There is road fund licensing, which would be very expensive if it is substituting fuel duty, or a tax on the meter in the home. In the end, that is where they will have to raise the tax. However, I think that it would be based on the recorded usage on the meter at the residence. If it is based on tax according to the meter at the home, there will have to be two meters in every home—one for the domestic use of electricity and one for the raising of revenue to substitute for the loss of fuel duty—which means that there will be two separate rates. We are entitled to know the Government’s thinking on this. How do they intend to raise revenue in future to substitute for fuel duty losses? In the time that I have spoken, I am sure that the civil servants in the Box have provided the Minister with an answer to my question.

[Lord Lucas]

Is there some rule of law that implies at the end of Amendment 41 the words “in respect of those premises”? If there is, I would like to know what it is. If there is not, then all that a vast operator of charge points has to do is to buy one house. It will then be the owners of domestic premises and this clause will no longer apply to it.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I think that it would apply to it as an operator, although of course it would not apply to it as an owner of residential property. We have made it absolutely clear that it is the charge operator and not the consumer who has to supply the data. That is the thrust of these amendments. Perhaps I may reflect on what my noble friend has said and write to him, but we do not see this as a loophole whereby a charge operator can escape its obligation to notify the national grid or whoever of the volume of consumption at a particular charge point.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for his ingenuity in seeking to broaden a rather narrow debate about data from a charge point into one about the future taxation policy as the nation moves from petrol-consuming vehicles to electricity. I am sure that there are brains in the Treasury who are aware of the potential threat to their revenue, but it is essentially a matter for the Treasury and not for this Bill. The Bill is not about taxation. The policy scoping notes and the Explanatory Notes make it clear that it is not intended to use this clause for taxation purposes in any way. The noble Lord raises important issues but, with respect, they do not arise from this narrow group of amendments.

Public Disorder

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Lucas

Thursday 11th August 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, first, we will have a couple of thousand of these people at our disposal for a year or so. Can we please have some proper academic research, using them, into the whys and wherefores? This is a new phenomenon for us. We really ought to try to understand it; this is an opportunity that we should not miss.

Secondly, as a resident of Battersea, this week it was immensely distressing that the police station 100 yards away from the centre of disturbance did not produce anybody for the first hour and a half of what was going on. As the noble Lord, Lord Dear, said, we need to look at that. It is totally unacceptable that that should be the service that the businesses and people of Battersea had.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, if concerns over the publication of photographs are to be set aside, as the Prime Minister said in his Statement, can we have a national review of the guidelines on pixelation of CCTV, which has been a growing tendency in recent years?