Finance (No. 3) Bill (Seventh sitting)

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 6th December 2018 Public Bill Committees

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will shortly publish the clean air strategy, which I hope will answer some of the hon. Gentleman’s perfectly legitimate questions about the long-term scale of our ambition to support communities. All of us who live part of the time in cities or bring up our children in cities want a significant improvement in air quality, and that strategy will be ambitious.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I appreciate that the Minister is providing all this information in answer to issues raised by the amendments. Given that he has all the information, it would be great if he just put it into a review, as the amendments would require, so that we could see it written down in six months’ time.

[Robert Jenrick]

I take the hon. Lady’s point, but the information is mostly already in the public domain. It is not clear to me what information is not available. With respect to air quality, the Government will very shortly publish our ambitious clean air strategy. I encourage her and other hon. Members who, perfectly understandably, want to scrutinise our clean air commitments to pay attention to that document and scrutinise the Environment Secretary at that point. No doubt he will come to the House to make an announcement on the strategy.

The hon. Member for Norwich South also mentioned London. London already has a separate comprehensive funding settlement from the Department for Transport, which includes measures to deliver compliance with legal air quality limits. The Mayor has significant powers to take additional measures. Londoners also receive further funding for ultra low emission vehicles such as taxis. Indeed, measures in the Bill support the uptake of ultra low emission taxis. We took those measures a year early, as we will discuss later, and they have had a significant impact on the number of taxis on the streets of London. There are now between 500 and 600 electric or ultra low emission taxis that did not exist at the beginning of the year, incentivised by the measures taken by the Treasury. We are also supporting low emission buses and charging infrastructure. The Committee has already discussed the £200 million public investment in charging infrastructure, which we hope will spur at least a further £200 million of private investment. That will support charging infrastructure in all parts of the United Kingdom.

I hope hon. Members respect the fact that we consider the funding settlement for London’s roads as separate from that for the rest of the United Kingdom. That is a long-standing convention. We occasionally provide additional money. For instance, in the Budget the Chancellor provided more than £400 million for potholes. He included London in that, so London boroughs are able to take advantage of that money, but in general the funding settlement for London’s roads is separate from the negotiation with respect to Highways England.

I urge the Committee to reject the amendments, as I believe the reports they would require are unnecessary. The changes outlined in the clause will ensure that the Government continue to support motorists with the cost of living while ensuring that they continue to make a fair contribution to the public finances. As a result of our decision to hypothecate VED revenues, we will see a major increase in investment in our strategic roads, which I hope will benefit everyone in all parts of the United Kingdom. I therefore commend the clause to the Committee.

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[Sir Robert Syms]

Apart from paying the levy, the road haulage industry pays considerable sums of tax on fuel; it therefore pays quite a lot into the Exchequer for the provision of roads. I would make another important point: almost every good that we have in this country travels at some point on a road haulage vehicle. Almost all of what someone buys in a supermarket for Sunday lunch travels in such a vehicle. There is no such thing as a painless tax. If we raise the cost of vehicles delivering goods in this country, the costs are raised for supermarkets and businesses and that is passed on in the form of higher prices and inflation. There is a balance to be struck.

The other point is that the British economy has been growing since 2009-10. As it grows, there are more vehicles on the road, and that is a difficulty. The real way to deal with climate change is probably to crash the economy, so that unemployment shoots up and vehicles come off the roads. It is a problem that, if we have the economy growing, there are more vehicles on the road. On the whole, the solution is technological, both in the development of the levy—the hon. Member for Norwich South made one or two suggestions for that—and also in the engines and the information that people get this days. There has been a big improvement. The biggest incentive that there ought to be for the industry is to replace vehicles more regularly because, in the end, that will probably have more impact on climate change.

I do not think that the solution to this problem is to increase costs. There are technological solutions that I am sure will come to help with all of our concerns about climate change.

[Kirsty Blackman]

If we are going to disincentivise people from using HGVs or charge them more for using HGVs, we need to make sure that we have a positive route with alternative methods of transport. There has been a massive increase in the number of light goods vehicles, which is negative if we end up with older diesel models.

We could develop the rail freight network. I understand that it is pretty difficult for those who are looking to increase rail freight to get time on the lines because of the number of passenger trains. Solutions to assist that would be very helpful in ensuring that freight is moved around the UK in the least carbon-emitting way possible.

Subsection (6)(b) relates to Euro 6. It describes the definition of Euro 6, saying that it is as in the EC directive. I am keen for the Government to lay out what would happen about the development of new standards after Brexit and any transition period. Is it their intention that we would have our own standards on vehicle emissions? If so, how much does the Minister believe it will cost to assess vehicles? What would be the cost of UK-EU regulatory divergence, which will result in issues for car manufacturers?

Alternatively, do the Government intend that we should not diverge from using the European Commission directive standards? Obviously technology is developing and there will be new standards to which we should peg our decisions on tax rates. If the UK Government plan not to have their own assessment centre, with regulatory divergence, do they plan to continue to follow EC directives? What preparation are the Government making in that case to scrutinise or comment on the directives, given that we will not be in the room after Brexit, and will therefore not be able to influence the standards, either to support our car manufacturers or secure the best standards for the British public and get improved air quality?

I understand that the Minister may not have the answer at his fingertips, but I hope he can say something.

[Robert Jenrick]

I shall try to respond to the many points that have been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Poole in part answered the challenge from the hon. Member for Norwich South as to whether hauliers pay their fair share. It is worth remembering that they pay a range of taxes, as my hon. Friend pointed out. They pay the levy that we are discussing and vehicle excise duties. They also pay tax on fuel. Taken as a package, hauliers pay a considerable amount of tax. British hauliers as an industry are highly taxed, going by European and international comparisons. The reforms mean that some hauliers will pay more. The VED system is based on both weight and axles, so to some extent it reflects wear and tear on the roads, although I appreciate the point made by the hon. Member for Norwich South that HGVs make a significant impact on the roads. I did not realise it was 100,000 times that of a Ford Focus, but that puts things in perspective.

The hon. Gentleman asked whether the HGV levy was specifically hypothecated to tackle such issues as potholes and strategic roads. It is not. However, as I have described, the VED system will be, which will significantly increase the amount of investment that the country makes in roads at every level: £28.8 billion is the spending envelope for roads investment announced by the Chancellor in the Budget, and £25 billion of it will be spent on strategic roads in the road investment strategy that will be announced later next year. That will be about 170% of the first road investment strategy, so there is almost double the amount of investment going into roads to tackle congestion and improve strategic roads in all parts of the country.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North made a valid point about the European standards. It is our intention to remain closely aligned to those. That seems sensible and it is our intention in a number of respects, such as climate change, emissions and carbon budgets, as is indeed set out elsewhere in the Bill. For example, we have not yet made a final decision on carbon trading, but we shall monitor it and review the matter. If I can give the hon. Lady any further information I will write to her to set out the position of the Department for Transport.

On the broader question of why we are not using the VED system for HGVs to encourage greater take-up of zero-emission or ultra-low emission HGVs, it comes back to the point made by the hon. Lady: currently there are very few commercially available ultra-low emission alternatives for HGV drivers, which prevents the broad uptake of new vehicles. Clearly, we would like to do all we can to stimulate the market and see rapid progress, but we have to be mindful of that. Through the Road to Zero strategy that was published earlier this year, the Government have committed to working with the industry to reduce HGV greenhouse gas emissions significantly by 2025. The strategy sets out the Government’s plans to use a variety of different tools to meet that commitment.

The hon. Member for Norwich South made a number of important points about HGVs and road safety. I will write to him on that and find out what information I can about DFT’s work, because it is important that we take note and see what can be done to improve road safety, particularly as the number of vehicles going down smaller roads and country lanes as a result of online shopping is becoming more important. Through the Road to Zero strategy and other initiatives, DFT is paying attention to how we can improve the last mile of delivery to tackle air quality and reduce the number of vehicles on our roads.

The clause introduces a lower rate of HGV levy for vehicles that meet the latest emission standard, and a higher rate for vehicles that do not. As we have discussed, the change will incentivise hauliers to move to cleaner, less-polluting vehicles. It is only right that everyone plays their part in protecting our natural environment so that we leave a cleaner, greener Britain for our children. HGVs currently account for approximately 20% of harmful nitrogen oxide emissions from road transport but only 5% of total miles travelled, so they will play an important part in tackling the problem.

The changes made by the clause will reduce HGV levy rates by 10% for vehicles that meet the latest emission standards, reflecting the fact that they generate 80% less NOx emissions than the older HGVs. The clause will also increase rates by 20% for HGVs that do not meet those standards. Many hauliers will pay less as more companies move to cleaner lorries—we have introduced it to improve air quality and not to raise revenue.

On amendments 115 to 118, to which the hon. Member for Norwich South spoke, the Government have published a tax information impact note outlining the impact assessment of these reforms, including the forecasted revenue effects, which have been certified by the Office for Budget Responsibility. I believe those amount to £25 million over the scorecard period. These reforms to the HGV levy are part of wider action by the Government to tackle challenges in the areas highlighted by the amendments. Isolating the impact of the HGV levy reforms would be extremely challenging and, I suspect, of limited use, as they cannot be separated from other actions the Government is taking in these areas.

The Government’s draft clean air strategy sets out an annual reporting process for the monitoring of air pollution, which is the appropriate mechanism for assessing the effectiveness of those changes and others over time, rather than introducing a new method to review it, as proposed by the amendments. I therefore urge the Committee to reject the amendments. The changes outlined in the measure will ensure that both foreign and domestic HGVs play their part in meeting the Government’s air quality targets.