Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the cessation of the electrical vehicle grant, what additional steps his Department is taking to help encourage the public to purchase electric vehicles.
This Government has committed £2.5 billion since 2020 to support the transition to zero emission vehicles, with funding to offset their higher upfront cost, and to accelerate the rollout of chargepoint infrastructure.
Although Government has recently closed the plug-in car grant to new orders, Plug-in Grants will continue until at least financial year 2023/24 for taxis and motorcycles, and 2024/25 for vans, trucks and wheelchair accessible vehicles.
Plug-in Grants are just one way in which Government supports electric vehicle uptake. We have put in place favourable benefit in kind tax rates for zero emission vehicles out to 2025: company car tax was 1% in 2021/22 and 2% in 2022/23 through to 2024/25. Further, all zero emission cars are exempt from vehicle excise duty (VED) and zero emissions vans pay a nil rate of tax on the van benefit charge.
In addition, we announced in the Net Zero Strategy that we will introduce a zero-emission vehicle mandate, setting targets for a percentage of manufacturers' new car and van sales to be zero emission each year from 2024.
In March we published our ambitious electric vehicle infrastructure strategy, backed by £1.6 billion of funding, setting out our vision and commitments to make electric vehicle charging cheaper and more convenient than refueling at a petrol station, supporting drivers across the whole country to make the transition to a cleaner, greener vehicle.