Electric Vehicles: Promotion

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Rachel Maclean)]

It is a huge pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for securing this important debate on the promotion of electric vehicle usage. Like him, I am a passionate and keen electric vehicle driver and enjoy the peace and quiet and the clean experience it brings me. I very much welcome the opportunity to set out what the Government are doing on this important agenda.

The transition to zero-emission vehicles is critical, as my hon. Friend said, in helping us to meet our climate change obligations and in improving air quality in our towns and cities. That is why we are going further and faster to decarbonise transport by phasing out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030; from 2035, all new cars and vans must be zero-emission at the tailpipe, putting us on course to be the fastest nation in the G7 to decarbonise cars and vans. On the back of the further announcement from the Prime Minister yesterday about our accelerated carbon targets, it is clear that we are playing a world-leading role in the fight against climate change under this Conservative Government.

I thank my hon. Friend for rightly pointing out all the positives of owning an electric vehicle. It is right that, overall, they are cheaper to run than the equivalent petrol and diesel car. He is also correct that range anxiety should be, and in most cases is, a concern of the past: in fact, 99% of car trips are less than 100 miles, and many of the latest electric vehicles can travel more than 200 miles on a single charge. For example, the Volkswagen ID.3 Pro has a 263-mile range, enough to drive from Westminster to my hon. Friend’s constituency, Don Valley, with 100 miles to spare—maybe stopping off in Gainsborough as well, Sir Edward.

My hon. Friend is also right to point to the stumbling blocks. I will start with the lack of rapid chargers. He pointed out that the Government are providing £1.3 billion to accelerate the roll-out of charge points on motorways and major A roads, in homes and businesses and on streets. That is part of an overall package of £2.8 billion to support industry as a whole and consumers to make the switch to electric vehicle motoring.

The UK is already a global front-runner in supporting provision of charging infrastructure. Government and industry have supported the installation of nearly 20,800 public charging devices, including nearly 3,900 rapid devices—one of the largest networks in Europe. In my hon. Friend’s own region of Yorkshire and the Humber, there are more than 1,000 publicly available charging devices, 311 of which are rapid devices. In England, a driver is never more than 25 miles away from a rapid charge point anywhere along England’s motorways and major A roads. However, I totally agree with my hon. Friend that there is much more to do, and we will come forward with a number of plans and announcements on our infrastructure strategy to deliver the charge points that we need to underpin this transition.

I agree furthermore with my hon. Friend that rapid charging is key to increasing the confidence in electric vehicles. Thanks to the Government and private sector working together, there are rapid and ultra-rapid charge points across 97% of motorway service areas in England, but we are ramping up this provision. We expect all motorway service stations to have at least six 150kW chargers by 2023, backed by investment from this Conservative Government, which means that someone should be able to charge their rapid charging-enabled car in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee, just as we would now with an internal-combustion-engine car.

It is important to recognise that slower forms of charging are important as well. Customers value the choice and flexibility to charge their vehicles at different speeds in different locations, such as overnight at home, at work or when they go shopping. I love the fact that I can go to sleep while my vehicle is charging and it is fully charged and ready to go when I wake up in the morning.

We have a comprehensive strategy to support the roll-out of charging. In addition to the £50 million we have made available this year for home and workplace charging schemes, we are proposing a number of important changes. We are refocusing our electric vehicle home charge scheme to support people living in rented and leasehold accommodation, which will level up our infrastructure roll-out. Our workplace charging scheme will be opened up to small and medium-sized enterprises and the charity sector.

We know that charging for people without off-street parking is a massively important issue. I encourage all parliamentary colleagues listening to this debate to speak to their local authorities and encourage them to apply, if they have not done so already, to our £20 million on-street residential charging fund, which was doubled last year by the Transport Secretary.

My information is that no local authority in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley has applied for this funding, so I encourage him to speak to his colleagues and co-workers at his local authority so they can apply for that funding, which could benefit residents. The money has been made available; it is down to local authorities to work with the Government and get the charging infrastructure where it needs to be.

The purpose of that scheme is to increase the availability of on-street charging points in residential streets, where off-street parking is not available. Many people live in homes and streets of this type. Some 75% of the capital cost of procuring and installing charge points is covered by central Government, and the Government provide free, impartial advice through a number of sources; I am happy to direct my hon. Friend to that.

I move on to the valid point that he raised about contactless payments at charge points. We agree with him that the experience needs to improve. We recently held a consultation to make payments easier, charge points more reliable and pricing more transparent, and to ensure that the data is open and accessible. We will come forward with a response to that and lay regulations on those topics in autumn 2021, parliamentary scheduling permitting.

Let me set out the Government’s position on the vehicle grants that my hon. Friend raised. Many of these matters are for the Treasury, as he knows. As we first signalled in 2018, our intention is to move away from grants as the market matures. We have refocused our vehicle grants to target the more affordable end of the market, where we know most consumers will be looking and where taxpayers’ money will make the most difference. In response to that, many manufacturers have reduced the prices of their vehicles. For example, BMW have dropped the price of their i3S by almost £7,500, which is a great win for consumers.

Our grants are working. In 2020, battery electric vehicles made up 6.6% of the new car market. Since 2011, our plug-in grants have supported 300,000 ultra low emission vehicles. We have committed a further £582 million to support vehicle grants, so we do see our grants having a long-term role to play, alongside other support, although we will continue to keep all these policies under review.

I turn now to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young). I thank him for raising the vital subject of hydrogen and the role of fuel cell vehicles in the transition to zero-emission motoring. As he knows, our ambitions for delivering greener transport are technology neutral. We believe that a range of zero-emission transport technologies will be adopted in the future. He highlighted a number of Government plans and projects that have supported hydrogen vehicles of all types already.

I put on the record my grateful thanks to him for the role he has played in securing the first hydrogen for transport hub, which is in his area of Tees Valley. It has come with £3 million worth of funding, to enable exactly the things that he describes and enable hydrogen for transport to develop alongside its application in the industrial, energy and other sectors of the economy. We are pushing ahead with plans for the hub. It is a world-leading project, and we believe it will set out a vision for the role that hydrogen can play in transport. I am very excited to see that progressing.

In the last couple of moments, Sir Edward, I refer to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar about artificial intelligence and driverless cars. He is right to mention that as we do not get to talk about the subject often enough, so I thank him for bringing it up. He mentions the exciting progress we have made in self-driving vehicles in this country, and the importance of understanding this new technology and its impact on society.

I believe self-driving vehicles have the potential to make journeys greener, safer, easier and more reliable. We have the opportunity to bring vast economic benefits to our country, by creating an industry and building on our existing world-leading expertise in automotive and engineering. The industry could be worth billions of pounds and could generate thousands of well-paid skilled jobs. As my hon. Friend knows very well, this Government’s intention is to build back greener, creating well-paid jobs in the industries of the future, and driving a green industrial recovery.

The introduction of self-driving vehicles to UK roads is closer than many would think. We are currently considering whether vehicles equipped with the new automated lane keeping system technology, which could enter the British market as early as the end of this year, can be legally defined as “self-driving”. [Interruption.] I hope you can hear me, Sir Edward.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

I can hear you perfectly.

[Rachel Maclean]

Great; I will continue. It is essential that the introduction of self-driving vehicles be supported by appropriate safety and legal frameworks. The UK has published three world-leading consultation papers on a comprehensive safety and regulatory framework for self-driving vehicles, led by the Law Commission. The final recommendations from the Law Commission are due by the end of this year, and I will be discussing them carefully with my colleagues across Government.

That is all part of the Government’s effort to make the UK the best place in the world to deploy and develop self-driving vehicles, which must, of course, be safe. The questions of safety and the role that artificial intelligence can play are at the forefront of my mind as a Minister in the Department for Transport.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley for this excellent opportunity to set out some of the work that we are doing in Government to promote electric vehicle usage across all parts of the UK. I agree that we need to take ambitious steps to scale up this exciting transition, for both electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen in all its forms. I assure him that we are not sitting back and letting this happen; we are actively pushing forward a number of strategies, including the transport decarbonisation plan, which is to be published later this spring and will set out a lot more detail.

With that, Sir Edward, I conclude my remarks and welcome the quiet, which sounds exactly like an electric vehicle driving.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

They are certainly quieter than the House of Commons Division bell.

Question put and agreed to.