Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

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

[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.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, at the risk of causing a bit of trouble at this stage of the Bill, I cannot see why it matters particularly where the charging points are in a motorway service station. If you are going to park your car and go off to have a drink, you might as well plug it in while having it. If you do not want to do that but have a high-powered, high-speed charger you can probably do that as if you are filling up with petrol. The general principle in the Bill is all right but I suspect that the commercial pressures on the operators will persuade them to put the charging points where they are most convenient.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for bringing forward these amendments, which seem to have produced a consensus on all the issues which were brought up on Report. I must agree with other speakers that the Bill is narrow and, to be fair, it is generally our role to scrutinise Bills. While we have done that, there has to be much wider consideration given by government to this whole area. That consideration has to work with other parts of government and local government, so that we do not trip into the area of sovereignty conflict. Fortunately, that seems to have been effectively solved by the amendments and the consultation. It is an important area to get straight if we are to achieve the spread of charging points that will be necessary, particularly to achieve our air-quality targets.