Electric Vehicles: Charging Points

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Dubs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to increase the number of charging points for electric vehicles.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government and industry have supported the installation of over 29,500 publicly available charging devices, including over 5,400 rapid devices. The Government have also supported the installation of over 300,000 charge points in homes and businesses and have announced over £1.3 billion to further accelerate the rollout of charging infrastructure.

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that information. However, do the Government accept that if the target of switching to electric cars is to be met, at least two things must happen? When an electrically powered car driver goes any long distance, he or she is nervous that they cannot charge to come back. Even more importantly, even in areas where there are plenty of charging points, they are nearly always taken up by cars that are not charging. That is a complaint from electric car drivers. The charging points are there in parts of London, but they cannot get to them because other people are using them as parking spaces. Can we do something about that?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I recognise the point raised by the noble Lord; there has been some media coverage about that recently and we are looking at what we can do. However, people are never more than 25 miles away from a rapid charger on the strategic road network, which is particularly good for long distance journeys. The Government have done an enormous amount of consultation over the past year on how we can mandate for new standards and for reliability, ensure that consumers can access support if they have trouble charging, make it easier for consumers to find the right charging point and its availability by publishing open data, and ensure that the costs are published as well, so that consumers can compare the costs of different chargers.