Smart Motorways

Debate between Grahame Morris and Trudy Harrison

Thursday 13th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Trudy Harrison]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent case for road improvements in his South Holland and the Deepings constituency. I have some sympathy with that challenge. I, too, have no motorway in my Copeland constituency. It is about an hour and 20 minutes for me to get to junction 36 on the M6, so I know how important good connectivity is. I am sure the Roads Minister, Baroness Vere, and our officials, will have heard his calls.

Thirdly, we should recognise that the focus and attention of many stakeholders and the media has resulted in a significant investment in the existing smart motorway network, and we are now going even further to invest £390 million in additional emergency areas, which we have heard an awful lot about today. That will bring us an extra 150 emergency places to stop—safe refuges, as they have been referred to today—which I know are important in creating safe perceptions for drivers.

The Government accept that there is more work to be done to move to a position where all drivers feel confident on smart motorways. That is where we need to get to.

[Grahame Morris]

The Minister has quoted some statistics, but I would refer to the statistics that were quoted earlier in the debate regarding the number of accidents on smart motorways that have been caused by vehicles that have broken down. I cannot remember the precise figure, but I think it was 48. Could the Minister clarify her view on the retrofitting of stopped-vehicle technology? Is she committed to ensuring that this five-year period is going to be one in which the retrofitting of specialist technology cameras to detect broken-down vehicles will be accelerated?

[Trudy Harrison]

I absolutely can confirm that, and I will move on to that when I address Members’ comments. The Government are bringing forward work to ensure that it is complete by September, which is six months ahead of the previous target.

We are taking forward all the recommendations made by the Transport Committee, including the recommendation to pause the roll-out of future all-lane-running schemes in order to gather further safety and economic data. We want to make sure that we have five years of that data across a wider network of open all-lane-running motorways. We want to complete and evaluate the roll-out of measures within the stocktake, which the Secretary of State commissioned, and the action plan with its 18 actions. It will enable evidence to be gathered to inform a robust assessment of options for future enhancements of capacity on the strategic road network as we prepare for the next road investment strategy. We will also take forward the recommendations to pause the conversion of dynamic hard-shoulder smart motorways to all-lane-running motorways until the next road investment strategy.

We will retrofit more emergency areas across existing all-lane-running schemes. We will conduct an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of stopped-vehicle detection technology. We will explore the introduction of the emergency corridor manoeuvre into the highway code, and we will investigate the benefits of health and safety assessments being undertaken by the Office of Rail and Road.

Electric Vehicles: Transition by 2030

Debate between Grahame Morris and Trudy Harrison

Thursday 9th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Trudy Harrison)]

It is a pleasure to be part of the debate and to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) for raising this subject, and all hon. Members who have spoken for their enthusiastic and passionate contributions about electric vehicles.

I will outline some of the support that the Government are providing for electric vehicles, before running through some of the questions from hon. Members. We have committed £2.5 billion in funding for vehicle grants and infrastructure to meet a very ambitious carbon target. We anticipate that up to quarter of the 36 million cars and vans on UK roads will be electric by 2030. As we can see from the data released by the SMMT recently, the pace of the transition is really accelerating. Industry data shows that almost as many battery electric vehicles were sold in September as in the whole of 2019, and that nearly one in five new cars sold in November 2021 was fully electric.

The journey is not just about the vehicles, however. As has been said, drivers will frequently need world-class charging infrastructure to support the full range of journeys and vehicles in our electric future. Rather than leaving that to the market, this Government have intervened: the Prime Minister announced his 10-point plan for net zero, which will phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans in the UK by 2030, as hon. Members have said. From 2035, all new cars and vans must have zero emissions at the tailpipe. In response to questions about the definition of hybrid, that definition is being worked on as I speak, and we will be able to update Members on those conclusions very shortly.

In October, the Government announced in our net zero strategy that we would introduce a zero emission vehicle mandate, which would come into force from 2024. The idea is to help the phase-out dates by setting targets for a percentage of a manufacturer’s annual new car and van sales in the UK to be zero emissions from 2024. Alongside our ambitious phase-out dates, we have also announced £1.3 billion to accelerate the roll-out of charging infrastructure, ensuring that drivers can charge where they need to and more easily than refilling a petrol or diesel vehicle. We are doing that through the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles.

Funding is available to support charge point infrastructure in homes, at workplaces, on residential streets and across the wider roads network. We have Homecharge, which provides £350 to homeowners to install charge points, and we have had about 230,000 householders take advantage of that. We have the on-street residential charge point scheme, which provides up to £13,000 per charge point to local authorities to install charging infrastructure, and the workplace charging scheme, which offers £350 per charge point. We have the local EV infrastructure fund, the charging infrastructure fund, the rapid charging fund—the Government are providing a wealth of support and building on the £1.9 billion from the spending review 2020, and we have committed an extra £620 million of this year’s spending review to support the transition to electric vehicles.

[Grahame Morris]

The Minister is being generous in giving way, and I am grateful for her listing all the investments and so on that have come through her Department, but has she had a chance to address the issues that I raised yesterday in a Delegated Legislation Committee, and indeed that the Transport Committee has raised, regarding the differential rate of VAT? Not everyone can have their own personal charging point if they live in a terraced house or a block of flats.

[Trudy Harrison]

The hon. Gentleman makes a common-sense point. We are looking at this, and I will, as he suggests, speak with my colleagues in the Treasury to see what we can do. I do think that the Treasury is playing an important part in this transition, but we need to work more with local authorities. Members across the House should work with their local authorities and with me, because, with their leadership and action through local transport and planning policies, we can really help to support the local zero-emission vehicle uptake, and make sure that it is integrated with local transport strategies.

The Government will publish an EV infrastructure strategy shortly. That strategy will define our vision for the continued roll-out of a world-leading charging infrastructure network across the UK, and focus on how we unlock the charge point roll-out needed to enable the transition from early adoption to the mass market uptake of EVs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Trudy Harrison]

I will take away that request, but I can tell the hon. Member that 26,000 public charge points are available and that of those 4,900 are rapid chargers. We also have a plan to install 750 kW as a minimum in all the 117 motorway service areas—and that absolutely includes the motorway services on the A1(M) at Ferrybridge at junction 41 and those at Wetherby at junction 46.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry). A couple of weeks ago, I had the absolute joy of visiting HORIBA MIRA in Nuneaton, where I saw the technology and innovation that is supporting not just decarbonisation but the connected and automated vehicles—they were was abundant with UK content, as the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) said—that the country will need to be at the forefront. The technology that I saw at Nuneaton will be critical to the transition, and the midlands engine is at the forefront of it. I am delighted that my hon. Friend came to the debate to talk about that.

I am running out of time, but I want to address the lack of driveways. We want to ensure that no driveway is no problem. We understand the need to roll out publicly available charge point infrastructure, and local authorities are key to that. We are therefore putting together a toolkit with advice and, most importantly, resources for where local authorities are struggling to deliver. My message to hon. Members across the House is to work with me and with local authorities, because they will know their local areas best. The Department wants to ensure that we have fair, accessible, affordable, reliable and transparent charging infrastructure right across the UK.

[Grahame Morris]

The Minister is being kind. I am afraid that she has not addressed the resilience of the national grid and its importance to charging. The BEIS Committee has just produced an interesting letter and report.

[Trudy Harrison]

That is a matter for BEIS, which it is clearly taking seriously. I work continuously with colleagues in BEIS as well as those in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on clean air zones. I will leave it there to allow the hon. Member for Bath to wrap up.