Carbon Emissions: Bus Fleets

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My understanding is that, progressively, the production of zero-emission buses has resulted in vehicles that have more capability of working a full day. The experiment in Harrogate referred to earlier, which is about charging vehicles during the day, is one way of ensuring that the bus industry will have the opportunity in due course of replacing all diesel buses with electric buses. I cannot currently answer the question about when that will be, but I know that that experiment is one of a number of things that need to happen in order that vehicles can be purchased with confidence to do all the jobs that buses do in England, Wales and Scotland.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I applaud the Minister for retrofitting one of his Routemasters with a more environmentally friendly engine. Given that, is he aware of any schemes to encourage bus companies to retrofit their existing stock of buses rather than scrapping them and having to buy new ones, given the environmental life cycle costs?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord refers to a vehicle built in 1962 that has Euro 6 emission standards. I have not yet quite got to the stage of fitting one of those vehicles with batteries, but you never know. The serious point here is that these vehicles last an average of 15 years, so taking steps for most or all new vehicles in the fleet to be zero emission is obviously the way of converting the entire fleet within a reasonable time.