Finance (No. 2) Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Richard Holden and Richard Thomson

Committee stage
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Richard Thomson]

I rise to speak in support of new clause 5, which is in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central. The Minister has run through why we are looking to have an assessment. I say to her as gently as I can that it is all fine and well to be proud of commitments that the Government have made, but it would be much better to rack up more quickly achievements that she could point to and be proud of on climate change, rather than just making statements of aspiration. This is one area where it is quite important to get some more chalk on the board.

As we have heard, the Bill sets a series of incremental changes to vehicle excise duty, and precisely because they are incremental, we might expect, at best, an equally incremental impact, or even an imperceptible one, on changing behaviour and on the resulting climate change impacts. We are all aware of the mandate to end the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles in a bid to encourage the take-up of alternatively fuelled vehicles, but I am of the same view as the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead: we will need some significant further incentivisation if we are to drive the change through that policy on the scale and at the pace that is required.

My party is very fond of drawing comparisons with Norway—another small country, like Scotland, of 5 million people—on the other side of the North sea. Sometimes those comparisons are about what might have been, but we also point to what could and perhaps what should be. Norway has been so successful in incentivising the take-up of electric vehicles that the Government are running out of hydrocarbon-fuelled vehicles to tax, which has resulted in a 19.2 billion kroner gap in their latest budget.

That is not a problem that the UK Government are likely to encounter any time soon, in view of the current take-up of electric vehicles, and that is why new clause 5 is so important. It would provide for an assessment of how effective or—as we suspect—ineffective these particular changes will be over the year, so that the UK Government had the necessary information base to set future policy as quickly as possible. I think the Minister knows that we need to do that at some point, and surely it is better to start sooner rather than later.

[Mr Holden]

rose—