Electric Vehicles: Transition by 2030

Debate between Ruth Edwards and Derek Twigg

Thursday 9th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ruth Edwards (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) for securing this debate on such an incredibly important topic. I have to declare an interest: I am the owner of an electric car. I also called for the Government to move their target for phasing out petrol and diesel vehicles forward to 2030, so I was absolutely delighted to see that in the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan.

As an early voice in favour of bringing the target forward, I heard many reasons why it would be absolutely impossible to do so. They ranged from the availability of minerals to the higher cost of electric cars, the strain on the electricity supply, range anxiety and the lack of a public charging network. None of those challenges is insurmountable, although they are certainly big challenges, as the hon. Members for Bath and for Easington (Grahame Morris) and my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) have set out. We have innovation in battery technology, and the hon. Member for Bath mentioned advances using silicon. Different models of car ownership, the Government’s plug-in car grant and smart charging regulations such as the ones currently before the House will all help to support the transition.

Today I want to focus on range anxiety and the public charging network. We trade a lot of facts and figures in this place, but I will focus on my own experiences as an electric car driver. I know that the Minister is an advocate of rolling out our EV infrastructure as fast as we possibly can, and I might have some ammunition to help her with that mission. I thought I would illustrate the issue using the experience of taking our electric car on holiday to Northumberland in the summer.

The first bit of advice I have for fellow Members, which is actually nothing to do with the public charging network, is do not go on holiday in a new car that has only just been delivered on the morning of your holiday, especially if you are used to driving a clunky old petrol-powered Land Rover and you have switched to an automatic electric MG. It does not do wonders for marital harmony, and nor does it make for a relaxing, stress-free break.

There were a worrying few moments when we thought we were going to have to reverse the entire way to Northumberland, which with a journey time of three and a half hours would have been quite a feat, but after a few minutes poking around with the controls, we did actually manage to start going in a forward direction, and we were off up the A1.

We pulled in at Ferrybridge services, plugged in and went for lunch feeling smug. This is easy! We can do this! We returned to find that absolutely no charge had been transferred to the car. Oh dear! Were we being silly, as the electric car newbies? No, the gentleman next to us—a veteran electric car user—was also having difficulty. The chargers were clearly out of order. “Never mind,” we thought. “Can’t work every time.”

So off we went to the next services at Wetherby. We plugged in to one of the chargers, and that charger seemed to be broken too. We phoned the charge point operator’s 24-hour hotline and they reset the entire system for us. They said, “It should be working now.” The only problem was that it was not. They said, “There must be a problem with the car.” Panic! We do not have enough charge to go forward, we do not have enough charge to go back and, lovely as Wetherby services is, I did not really want to spend my holiday there. So we phoned the car dealership, and lots of people were running round in the dealership in Portsmouth freaking out that the car they had sold us, which could be charged, now suddenly could not be charged.

Twenty minutes later, when one of the other chargers came free, I said to my husband, “Let’s have one more go.” We plugged in and it worked. So it was not us and it was not the car, but two out of three electric chargers at motorway service stations did not work. I just could not believe it—imagine if two thirds of the petrol pumps we tried to use at a petrol station were not working.

So off we went. There was not a charger at our hotel, so we tried to use the one in the local village next morning, except someone was using it. Our Zap-Map showed that there were three chargers in Hexham, so off we pootled. We found two charging points, both of them wrapped in thick black shrink plastic. Had they just arrived? Were they leaving? Who could tell? But we certainly could not use them to charge our car. We finally tracked down another one outside Waitrose, but that was not working either. So there were three chargers, and not one of them was working. We managed to find one in the end—the one in the village became free.

The next day we went up to Hareshaw Linn, with its beautiful waterfall. We had a lovely walk—I thoroughly recommend it. Waves of joy and relief broke over us as we arrived in the car park to find a charger that was free and that appeared to be working—but how did it work? It looked like a bollard. There were no instructions on it. I could not work out how to get the plug out or anything. All that was written on it was, “Please present a tag to charge.” Hmm, where was I going to find a tag, even if I had a description of what one was, in the middle of Northumberland national park?

The name Electro was emblazoned on the side, so we looked it up and called it on our phone. We gave it the number of the machine, but the company could not find it on its system, and neither could the app, so we could not use that one either. We then found a sticker—maybe it was BP Pulse—but the app would not take our debit cards so, again, that was a complete write-off. We did manage to find some charging points throughout Northumberland that did actually work on our holiday, so we did get around.

Then, on our way back, we stopped off again at Wetherby services—that place where we nearly spent the entire week. There was a queue of six cars to use the chargers. Assuming an average charge time of 20 minutes, we would have had to wait two hours just to charge the car, so we would have been there for two hours and 20 minutes or two and a half hours. That is almost as long as the entire journey, so off we went to the lovely village of Boston Spa, which I thoroughly recommend, and there we were confronted with an Engie EV charger. Again, to charge, we had to give our names, our address and our contact details before we could register to pay and charge. Can you imagine the chaos if that happened at the petrol pumps, Mr Twigg?

I do not want to give the impression that the unfortunate set of circumstances that I have described happens to us every day. We do manage to get around in the car. We normally charge at home and we do not have any issues, but as has been pointed out—

[Derek Twigg (in the Chair)]

Order. Can I ask the hon. Member to wind up, please?

[Ruth Edwards]

As has been pointed out, lots of people do not have the option of charging at home, so I have three asks: first, more chargers at key points, such as motorway service stations; secondly, a ban on using apps to pay for charging—people should be able to pay with debit cards; and thirdly, on service expectations around reliability, if people are taking their car out, they have to be able to have a reasonable level of confidence that they will be able to drive it home again. Those are my three asks for the Minister.