Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Lord Walney Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

It is my habit to be influenced by Members of the House during the course of debates. That may sound unconventional, but I actually take Members’ contributions in debates such as this extremely seriously, and I think that that is a very good point. I am happy to have discussions about that with my colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government. There are issues about the inconsistent provision of on-street charging. That is partly due to planning, and partly due to the fact that some local authorities are more willing than others to install charging points. It is a discretionary matter for planners at the moment, but it does seem to me to be entirely appropriate to consider some of the things that the hon. Lady has suggested, so I am more than happy to have such discussions.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

While the Minister is in an open frame of mind, will he look not simply at the lack of on-street provision, but at the unreliability of the network at the moment? If he has regularly driven in an electric car, he may well, like so many of us, have had the experience of coming into a motorway service station and finding that the charger is not working and that there is no 24-hour help, which for people whose battery is down to zero is a very significant problem. He may also have had experience of the fact that there are myriad different companies and that many of the providers’ systems are not interoperable and do not allow access when people arrive at a service station. A Government who are going to frame such a market could easily intervene and improve this situation.

[Mr Hayes]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has had early sight of my speech—if he did, he is even more remarkable than I regarded him previously—but I was about to come on to the principal reasons people cite for not buying electric cars. The first is the up-front cost, which will of course come down as volumes grow. As he will know, the Government already contribute considerable amounts of money—again, I will speak a bit more about that later—to offsetting some of that cost. The second is battery reliability, and people’s doubts about the technology that is driving electric vehicles. The third is the charging infrastructure, as he described, which is precisely why the Bill addresses that point. It is vital to put in place a charging infrastructure that is widely available and consistent, and that works. He described the circumstance in which someone who might otherwise have bought an electric vehicle is put off from doing so because they are not confident that the infrastructure is as good as it should be, and that is precisely why the Government are addressing this matter in the Bill. We have the chance to debate it tonight and beyond tonight during the Bill’s consideration.