Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, if he has made an assessment of the potential merits of mining lithium in the UK to produce responsibly sourced electric vehicle batteries.

In order to meet the anticipated global demand for batteries for electric vehicles, production needs to increase significantly worldwide. Lithium and associated Li-ion technology is a key component. The Faraday Battery Challenge is supporting the increase in production of current Li-ion technology - from early stage research, through innovation, to scale-up - to help position the UK to best capture this market.

The Faraday Battery Challenge is looking at the feasibility of extracting lithium in the UK, including in Scotland and Cornwall. Research suggests that domestic sources of lithium have the potential to provide a substantial portion of the UK’s future demand, allowing us to develop a domestic, environmentally responsible, lithium supply. In order to ensure that the full value that we expect this new industry to generate is captured in the UK, it is essential to build the rest of the downstream supply chain domestically, so that battery-quality chemicals and batteries can also be produced here.