EV Strategy: (ECC Committee Report)

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for her superb chairing of the committee; it was a real pleasure to be part of it.

I share my noble friend Lord Lilley’s aversion to subsidy. It seems to me that subsidies that are too large and too long stop real solutions emerging, and that we really need to work against them. It was a huge pleasure being on the committee with him. I learned what dissent effectively delivered with great style was, and I learned how one can chair in such circumstances, so it was a great educational experience.

I do not think my noble friend should despair too much about not being on the committee any more: we have my noble friend Lord Frost there. I see that the current inquiry is into methane. When I was a Whip in MAFF, the BSE crisis hit and the first reaction of the scientists was, “We must kill every cow in the country”. I hope, with the fate of the cows being in my noble friend’s hands, that he will mount as good a defence as the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, did under those circumstances.

There are some things the Government can do to move things along. First, on regulations, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and others, we are faced with a set of regulations, particularly when it comes to flats, on-street charging and similar areas, where we are deliberately slowing things down. We are making it harder to make progress. This is a Government who have said, in Defra, in housing and elsewhere, that they will do something about ineffective and unnecessary regulations. I know how hard that is but I am optimistic; I very much hope that the Government will go down that way.

Another area where regulations have been getting in the way is on the evolution of small, cheap electric vehicles. If I want something that will carry myself and a couple of kids, or maybe the shopping around town, I can go to China and buy it for £1,500. The cheapest alternative here is £15,000. Some of that difference is quality but an awful lot of it is regulation. The question of whether the value that we are getting from that regulation justifies the cost of implementing it really needs examining. We really ought not to be getting in the way of the development of new forms of local mobility in the way that we are.

I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said about information. We ought to publish an overall projection for energy and net zero. I would not call it a plan—it is too uncertain and far away for that—but it should be something that shows us how the Government believe we can get there, including what the steps will be, what the consequences will be and what the experience will be like. It should be open, moving, discursive and, above all, truthful. That would make a good base for good policy. The current darkness, for which the previous Government must accept some responsibility, is not a constructive background.

I would also like to see open information rigorously applied to the availability and state of charging points, so that anyone can find out the state of any charging point and where they might go in the hope of finding it, rather than it being balkanised into little sets of information for people who subscribe to particular networks. I would really like to see people being able to rent out their own home charging spaces to other people. Apart from not having an electric car and the ability to charge it, I cannot see why I should not be able to have someone else’s car on my drive and charge it there. The prices charged for on-street parking are ridiculous. I could make a very nice little turn, as I might do from selling my surplus strawberries, by selling a bit of electricity and thereby keeping everybody’s price down.

Lastly, I would like to see us pay serious attention to resilience—getting ourselves into a position where we can genuinely support a manufacturing industry. The key thing that I would like to see us do is put money into battery research. We cannot continue— it is totally impossible—to rely on the rare materials that find their way into current batteries. We have to do better; there are signs that we can do better. If we find ourselves at the forefront of a really effective sodium battery development, we will have a chance to create that industry or a share of it here, but while we rely on old materials and rare materials, we really must keep here the materials that get here. We must have an effective recycling industry so that what comes here stays here and we can use it to make new batteries.