Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill — House of Lords, 2018-06-05
Topic: Energy
Bryony Worthington (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, in moving this amendment, I will speak also to Amendments 23 and 28 in my name. We are returning to the topic of Clause 10. I have perhaps been critical of the Government’s Bill in suggesting that it is a little lightweight and does not contain very much. However, it contains one interesting clause, Clause 10, which takes a power to require that private companies which occupy an important strategic position could be required, through regulation, to make provision for charging/refuelling. It is probably the most interesting part of the Bill. However, the clause is unnecessarily narrow In Committee, we discussed the issue of the narrowness of this definition. I know that currently the department’s thinking is that this measure is taken to address the specific issue of range anxiety while on the motorway. I have tabled this set of amendments to ask the Government to think again about why they have chosen to take all this parliamentary time and effort to focus on one element of the transition. It is an important element. All of us who drive electric vehicles and have been on a motorway know the feeling of the charge going down far faster than it does on an A road, and having to look for the next point on your journey where you can safely recharge. That will be better once this has been addressed However, this is just one of many instances where the infrastructure and the vehicles need to be in harmony. There are many other ways in which we could bring about an increase in the uptake of electric and zero-emission vehicles if we make sensible regulations to provide the infrastructure in a wider selection of places, the most obvious of which have to be car parks. We know that a large amount of charging will be done either overnight at home when the vehicle is not in use, or perhaps during the day, or it will be done in destinations where people are stopping already to spend time and money and can charge conveniently while doing something else. Given that, car parks would be great places to build out this strategic infrastructure. These amendments seek to amend Clause 10 so that it is not unnecessarily narrow and focused purely on fuel retailers and service stations I know that the Minister has been thinking about this issue since Committee, because we did talk about it, but I would put this question to her. Perhaps we can go back in time and ask why it was that the Government decided to embark on a whole Bill process to address just this one narrow question around motorway range anxiety. Would it not have been wiser to have taken a broader approach? I have even gone back to the original consultation document for the modern transport Bill. Five of the seven questions asked in relation to infrastructure related to fuel retailers and only one question at the end asked which other places might be useful. In fact, a large number of respondents suggested that lots of places such as car parks would be very useful. The consultation responses in the summary are quite hard to interpret and we cannot see the raw data, but my gut feeling is that this decision was taken a long time ago and the Government have possibly even forgotten both when and why they took it. We need to revisit the question of narrow scope and Clause 10 being so strangely focused on just one part of the transition. The knowledge is there, but it is simply not enough to put us on the right footing to embrace the transition properly I hope that I will hear some words of reassurance, because Clause 10 is so important to the subsequent parts of the Bill that we will come on to. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and I beg to move.