Extracts from Lords
debate on Smart Motorways
(LD):...Finally, I raise
the issue of electric vehicles. When an
electric vehicle ceases to function, it stops; it
does not coast in the way that other vehicles do. Smart motorways
are supposed to be the future, but the future is electric. Those
vehicles stop very suddenly. They also cannot be towed; they have
to be put on a low-loader, which is a much more complex and longer
process that will put rescue teams in greater danger. So can we
have special consideration for how these new motorway layouts will
operate when there are lots of electric vehicles
on the road?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for
Transport () (Con):...I note the comments from the noble
Baroness, Lady Randerson, about electric vehicles.
When I first heard this, I was absolutely astonished. Quite
frankly, this is applicable not just to smart motorways but to
every single road. We will need to be able to move electric
vehicles wherever they happen to stop or end their days. I
assure her that I will now look into it with great gusto, provided
I keep my job. Work is under way to look at short-term measures to
make sure we can get electric vehicles off to
places of safety as quickly as possible, on whichever road, because
that certainly would be a large drawback to the introduction of
electric vehicles.
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Extract from Public Bill
Committee (Agriculture Bill)
(Bristol East) (Lab)
Q Meeting net zero is a public good, looking at climate
mitigation and adaptation. Do you feel the Bill could be stronger
on that? My concern is that while in a sector like transport it
is quite easy to make big policy moves that shift us, say, to
electric vehicles because there is only a small
number of car companies, in agriculture there are lots of
different types of farmers with a large geographical spread. How
do you get them all working towards that net zero goal, and could
the Bill be a mechanism to do that more effectively? I have not
heard much from the National Farmers Union about the road map for
getting there.
Gareth Morgan (Soil Association): It is fantastic
that the NFU has taken the position of committing to an early net
zero target for the agriculture and land use sector. That has
shifted the debate enormously. Establishing the route map by
which you do that is quite difficult. I am not entirely sure that
a net zero clause in the Bill is the right way to go about it.
In several sectors—such as transport and energy generation—we
have a clear idea about what that route map needs to be. Land use
will be much more complicated. We do not know all the answers
yet—for example, in the current argument about red meat, we are
veering a different way each month. Setting a clear trajectory in
farming to net zero in law could be counter-productive. The
easiest way for us to go net zero in terms of land use in the UK
is to stop farming and plant trees everywhere and import food off
our balance sheet. That would be madness, but it could be an
inadvertent consequence if we get the wrong sort of legal fix
into law. I think the Bill could be more explicit about net zero
and the need to achieve it, but we need to be careful about the
way in which we phrase that.
