Extract from Welsh Assembly: Motion on an electric vehicle charging planning bill - May 16

Debate on a Member's legislative proposal, and I call on Rhun ap Iorwerth to move the motion on an electric vehicle charging planning Bill. Rhun.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I thank the Business Committee for giving me the opportunity to make this legislative proposal today. I drove my first electric car back in 2009 in China. I was filming in the BYD company factory—a company that was established in 1995 that develops batteries, and that claims to be the biggest manufacturer of electric cars in the world. They sold 100,000 electric cars last year, and there is a chance that many people listening to this haven’t heard of BYD, and I think that is characteristic or symptomatic of the relationship between Wales and electric cars.

There are major developments happening in this area, but they’re not known by people in Wales. Yes, there are some electric cars around the place, but they’re still rare. There are some hybrid cars, but we’re not talking about those today—they still have engines burning petrol and diesel that pollute the environment. But in a matter of a few decades this will all change.

There are long-term pledges starting to emerge already to get rid of the diesel and petrol engines entirely. The UK and French Governments have mentioned 2040, for example, as a target to aim for. But the choice for us in Wales is now clear. We can wait for the electric car revolution to happen to us, or we can try and lead that change—prepare the way, and try to encourage the people of Wales to take a lead on this, which will be inevitable anyway, ultimately. What I’m proposing is legislation that would be a step forward towards ensuring the kind of infrastructure that we will need to charge these electric vehicles, in order to make it easier for people to choose this new technology.

Take your pick of estimates about the pace of change, but we know we are heading for an electric vehicle, or EV, future. As an aside, yes, we need to persuade more people out of cars altogether. Cleaner, greener public transport, alongside active travel, has to be the subject of heavy investment. But the car will be with us for some time yet. What won't be with us is the internal combustion engine. 

Now, UBS bank reckons 14 per cent of car sales will be EVs by 2025. That's growing from pretty much a standing start of not much more than 1 per cent now. In Wales, we count EV car sales in the few hundreds, but even here the growth has been large—35 per cent growth between 2016 and 2017. But, two decades from now, the job will be complete. The question is: when will Wales decide to genuinely get on board?

We need to overcome a number of barriers. Some are beyond our control: the development of battery technology, better range, faster charging, growth in the choices of models available—that's global. We can hope to cash in through research in our universities, through trying to ensure that our car components sector keeps up with or, better still, keeps ahead of changes. We've even got Aston Martin planning to build a flagship EV here, but what I'm talking about today is the application of that new technology for you and me—in other words, getting people to actually buy and drive the cars and to feel that to do so will be as convenient as their current petrol or diesel.

One of the biggest barriers is where to charge. This is very much in our own hands. What I'd like to investigate is using legislation to overcome this. I'm proposing that all new developments—housing, factories, public buildings, offices, tourist attractions, car parks, whatever it might be—must include charging infrastructure by law. The vast majority of EV users will charge at home overnight. If you're lucky enough to have somewhere to park your car with an EV point, that's what you'd be doing mostly. If we want more people to opt for EVs, though, we need new homes to have those EV charging points pre-installed. If you don't have a parking place, plentiful charge points everywhere and elsewhere will be important to you. We need to invest in retrofitting a wide range of parking areas, for example, but what I'm suggesting today is that, whenever there's a new development, there should, by law, be new charge points. [Interruption.] Yes.

Just to remind him we had a debate, or questions rather, on broadband access and infrastructure about an hour ago, when the Minister was very unhappy that new developments are not required to have broadband access as part of the development. That's precisely what we cannot allow to happen with this move to electric vehicles.

Yes, it's not that long ago since we had outside toilets built outside homes, but now it's a kind of expectation that you have a bathroom in the house. We need to move with the times. 

So, you need local-use charge points, but we have to have a proper national network as well. I'm looking forward to picking up a Renault ZOE from Renault UK in a few weeks' time, driving from my Ynys Môn constituency the 200 miles to my Cardiff workplace. It'll be interesting because, as far as I can see, there are no rapid-charge points between Anglesey and Cardiff. So, it'll be an interesting journey. But that has to change. So, we need to retrofit installations at strategic points, but installations at new developments for public use dotted around Wales can form part of a new national network. 

Now, on funding, I think there should be an element of public funding, perhaps public loans available for installation, certainly in the most strategic places. Plaid Cymru recently negotiated £2 million for this in the last budget deal. At least it's a start. If you look at the number of publicly funded charge points in the UK now, I think the north-east of England is top of the league with one charge point publicly funded per 4,000 inhabitants; Scotland one for every 7,000 people. Wales, according to HSBC figures recently, had one publicly funded charge point per 99,000 people. It's not good enough. But the focus today isn't on funding, it's on building charging networks into our environment. We'll hear from Welsh Government today, I'm sure, that they're already consulting on new planning guidelines, rather than legislation, but we need to be sure that this drive towards EVs is backed by whatever it takes to make it happen.

I don't need to rehearse the environmental arguments, I don't think—the issues of air pollution and climate change. Hopefully, I don't need to persuade you that, for many good reasons, EVs are coming. This isn't about just making sure Wales is ready when the inevitable happens, but about seeing if we can get Wales to embrace that future now, and I look forward to your contributions. Thank you.

I certainly welcome the initiative that we're debating today to introduce planning guidelines for new developments to ensure that new buildings must include charging points and to make it easier for people to use electric vehicles in order to reduce carbon emissions, although it should be noted that electric vehicles by themselves don't reduce carbon emissions—it's simply a different source of power. Unless the base source is renewable, it simply shifts the problem elsewhere, so I think we should be careful in the language we use there. It will certainly improve local air quality, and that's to be welcomed, but overall air quality and overall emissions will not be affected unless we're using renewable sources of energy to begin with, so I think we should add that very important caveat.

As I understand it, the Welsh Government are going out to consultation on electric vehicle charging points this summer, and they're already getting kick-back from some developers about the idea of having to provide ducting. I would urge the Government to be very robust about this and also to be imaginative about it—to explore with some of the power-generation companies the opportunity to pilot different approaches, where sources of charging points can be put in where the cost is borne by other people. As I understand it, there are some companies interested in discussing doing just this.

We also need to think about the type of charging that we prioritise. Do we prioritise the current technology of the Nissan Leaf, for example, which takes, I understand, some five or six hours to charge, or do we leap ahead to the next generation of rapid-charging technologies, which will be able to do it in a fraction of the time? Which of those do we choose to prioritise first?

We need to think about where they go as well. We should be moving to a cleaner form of transport, but that mustn't be at the expense of sustainable forms of transport. We must say, I think, at the outset that the charging points should not be allowed to be put in pavements, where they could be an impediment to walking and cycling and disabled people, but they must be on roads. 

We must also, I think, ask ourselves: should we be planning for a one-to-one replacement of petrol with electric vehicles, or shall we take this as an opportunity, as people are making a change, to try to promote a more intelligent approach, favouring, for example, public transport and active travel in urban areas and focusing the electric vehicle approach in rural areas instead? I think this is something that we should be considering.

Finally, Llywydd, electric vehicles are going to be expensive, and this could entrench existing levels of transport poverty, where people in low-income families are forced to invest in running a car to access key employment and services, getting themselves into debt. I think we should be looking at car-sharing opportunities for electric vehicles. There are some examples of co-operative shared electric vehicle schemes in St David's and in Powys currently. There was an experiment with standard car clubs in Cardiff, as part of the sustainable travel city some years ago, and that's something, I think, we need to pick up with alacrity, because these are going to be out of the reach of many families, and not every family needs a car—most cars stand idle for 23 hours of the day in their drives.

So, overall, as we are shifting to a different technology, we should seize the opportunity to get behaviour change as well.

I agree with a lot of what has just been said by Lee Waters, but I do thank Rhun for bringing this forward as a legislative proposal, and I certainly agree with the broad objective. Whether we need a legislative vehicle—sorry to use the pun—I'm unsure, but it's good that we are discussing these issues.

As Lee Waters said, we need to remember that the way we generate energy is key here, and moving to non-carbon sources is really essential. Also, it's essential to look at the issue of congestion in cities, which would not necessarily be achieved—or the reduction wouldn't necessarily occur—if we just replace current petrol and diesel vehicles with electric vehicles. However, electric vehicles are clearly very much part of the answer, indeed, not least in the public transport fleet. So, I think this is a really useful discussion and it's one where I want to see Wales moving ahead.

As Rhun said, at the moment, we do not compare particularly well with other parts of the UK. In 2012, there were just 53 electric cars in Wales; that had increased to 1,523 by 2016, which of course is a massive percentage increase but I think here the absolute number is really what we should be looking at. Other parts of the country have moved ahead quicker than us so far, so we need to look at this. It's all about where there are rapid-charging points. I think we'll need to look at public buildings first. We certainly need to look at the major road network because to travel between Anglesey and Cardiff and potentially not have a charging point is really problematic.

So, I think we need this to be part of a wide strategy, but it's definitely something where I think the public are going to push us even harder than we are prepared to go at the moment. There are a lot of issues here where Government needs to take the way in looking at it as an infrastructure issue, the huge stock of public buildings being an obvious place to start. You already see it in some developments—I've noticed it around the Vale of Glamorgan—that new housing does come with the charging points so that you don't have a long, clumsy lead to the back of your garage, but you actually see the charging point at the front of the house. 

So, that is where people will demand that the market goes, I think, but we need to facilitate that shift as well. So, I'm pleased this is being discussed and I've a very open mind as to whether it should be done by legislation or whether there are more traditional policy approaches that we can adopt.   

Thank you to Rhun for bringing this motion, because it's certainly a very interesting motion. I'd like to say a few brief comments about it, and I'm broadly in support of the motion.

Just as builders had to wire their new buildings for electricity and modern offices have to be wired for computers et cetera, it makes sense, as technology and society progresses, that planning guidance be adjusted to keep pace. So, I will be supporting this motion, as more people are using electric vehicles and it is the state's role to ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place to facilitate people living their lives.

I do have a couple of concerns, the first one being when it comes to applying this rule to all new houses so that all new homes have to have the points installed. I can see where you're coming from with that but my concern is that the additional cost of having those charging points installed in all new homes will be inevitably passed on to the homebuyer. Homebuyers are already having to pay a premium for new builds. Some people are saying that that effectively cancels out the benefits of any help-to-buy scheme, and any premium that's paid will also be handed on to any tenant. So, burdening people with a forced increase could make it harder for people to find a home. I'm sure the last thing that anybody in this place wants to do is make it more expensive for people to buy a home by pushing up the price of new builds.

The other concern I have, which is a point alluded to by Lee, is that encouraging increased electric car usage at this point does seem to be putting the cart before the horse, since there's a danger of forgetting that most of our electricity is currently coming from polluting power stations, not from renewables. So, the extra electricity required to charge cars will at present do nothing but increase emissions from local power stations and effectively just moves the problem from one place to another.

As has already been said, maybe fewer cars should be used—but we've had 40 years or more of local authorities and Governments building their planning and economic strategy around widespread use of the car. So, saying that people need to drive less is, okay, logical, but it's a very, very difficult thing to achieve in modern society. 

Of course, an electricity supply sourced mainly from clean energy sources could be achieved with the right investment in research and development, but we're not at that stage, and we're nowhere near it yet, and we shouldn't be acting as if we were. I don't believe that the decisive factor in whether or not to buy an electric car is whether you've got a charging point at your house, although it's obviously going to be a factor. The key factors are going to be cost—how far a single charge will carry you—and, for the environmentally minded, how much pollution it will realistically create. For electric cars to become the norm, a revolution is going to have to take place in how far we can travel between charges and the recharge time, and we don't know what the next game-changing step will be for these cars. So, another concern for me is that we may end up bringing in rules that costs the taxpayer and the homeowner a significant sum of money in the long term for charging points that will just be outdated and obsolete before they've ever been used. Thank you.

Of course, I support the proposal by my colleague to bring this legislative proposal forward, but I do that for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s my aspiration and Plaid Cymru’s aspiration that we cease selling new cars that are reliant on fossil fuels by 2030, and I’m shocked that the Westminster Government hasn’t taken steps to hasten this process. We are still looking to 2042 for this, although we know the impact on air quality that emerges from these fossil fuel engines, and diesel engines particularly. I’m also doing this because we are of the view that although this growth is happening almost organically in terms of electric vehicles, it is true to say, as with broadband, as I mentioned, that vast parts of Wales would be missing out unless there were state intervention to ensure equality. The point that Lee Waters made was a fair one, but in order to assist with that equality then Government has to step in and ensure that this does happen. I think that that is something that we’re familiar with in a Welsh context.

After Plaid Cymru negotiated the £2 million for the public vehicle charging scheme, I have contacted every county council in Wales to ask them what they were doing to help with this process and, to date, I’ve received responses from half of them, including Anglesey—so, congratulations Anglesey. I’m not here to name the councils because each of them say that they’re doing their very best, but, clearly, what’s missing is that there are some councils without any public charging points at all. There are areas of Wales—. If you travel, Rhun, from Anglesey to Cardiff, it’s quite possible, like with the train, that you’d have to travel through England to ensure that you can take that journey safely. That’s the kind of framework we have in place at the moment.

A few things have arisen that suggest to me that we do need some legislation, or the force of legislation, in this area, and they are: the need to create a national network; the need for that network to be badged with a Welsh identity so that people know that the Welsh Government is part of this process; that we ensure through legislative commitments that these charging points are open source and available to all—what you have is that one company wants to keep it for their own vehicles, but we need this to be available to everybody—and that we can encourage and help local councils and other public bodies interested in this area not just to provide one point, but many charging points. We need significant investment here. Yes, we need to prepare for future growth rather than what we have at the moment, as David Melding mentioned, but we need to see that happening.

The final point in the context of Government intervention is that the grid in parts of Wales isn’t sufficiently robust to deal with the growth that we will see in vehicle charging. The capacity of the grid is restricted in parts of Wales, particularly in mid Wales, and the Government will need to collaborate with the Westminster Government to tackle that particular issue. As the grid have said it won’t be possible to have batteries larger than 1 MW in Wales for at least a decade—that’s the position of National Grid—then the concept of having small batteries scattered around the place mainly in electrical vehicles and using renewable energy is very attractive to me, but we need Government intervention, there is no doubt about that.

I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs, Lesley Griffiths. 

Diolch, Llywydd. I very much welcome the opportunity to respond to this debate, and I thank Members for their very thoughtful contributions. I wholeheartedly support the intent of the debate, and I'm determined to do all I can to increase the use of electric vehicles in Wales. We know the future of petrol and diesel vehicles is limited, with the UK Government announcing its intention to ban them by 2040. In the meantime, the automotive industry is already rising to the challenge. Volvo, for example, has announced that all new models it launches from 2019 will be partially or completely battery powered.

If we are to realise our ambitions for decarbonisation, we must ensure we make adequate provision for electric vehicle charging. However, I'm not convinced the proposals for legislation that we have heard today are the most appropriate way forward. My colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport has already embedded decarbonisation in the economic action plan and made a commitment of £2 million funding to help improve publicly accessible charging infrastructure, and my approach to changes to the planning system complements this. Clearly, the planning system must be an enabler rather than an obstacle in the take-up of electric vehicles, so we must address the issue now. We need a concerted and joined-up approach to ensure the adequate provision of charging facilities.

I'd just like to briefly outline what we're already doing. National planning policy needs to give a clear steer about the importance of charging facilities. The current 'Planning Policy Wales' consultation includes a requirement for a minimum of 10 per cent of new non-residential car parking spaces to have charging points, and we're the first in the UK to do this. Before the end of this month, I'll be publishing a consultation on new permitted development rights, and this will include the introduction of permitted development rights for the installation of electric vehicle charging points in homes and businesses. Finally, changes to the energy performance of buildings directive will set out charging point infrastructure requirements for all new residential and non-residential developments, and this directive must be transposed by 2020.

I want to assure Members that I will consider imposing more stringent standards through planning or building regulations if the directive does not meet our ambitions. Alongside these policy changes, I'm already having discussions with National Grid—I think Simon Thomas raised a very important point about the ability of the national grid to support our plans for electric vehicle charging points—and also having discussions with the UK Government. Several Members said we need to be more imaginative, we need to take the initiative, and I absolutely agree; we need to make sure that Wales is well placed to take advantage of electric vehicles. So, the changes I've outlined today are only the start of the process, and as the technology develops, we need to ensure Wales is at the forefront of these developments.

Will you take a—? Oh. [Laughter.]

I was just on three minutes.

Rhun ap Iorwerth to reply to the debate.

Thank you very much. Could I thank everyone who's taken part in this discussion this afternoon? I'm encouraged by the spirit of the debate. I'll come to the Minister last, possibly. In terms of the comments that have been raised already,

there are a number of points raised by Members that I'd perhaps like to comment on quickly. Lee Waters and David Melding raised the issue that you still have to generate electricity somehow, and that's no good if you're generating it by burning fossil fuels, for example. Actually, absolutely, we need to move to non-carbon electricity generation, but the electric vehicle itself is far more efficient than the internal combustion engine, so even if you're burning fossil fuels, which we don't want to do, you'll probably be three, four, five, six or seven times more efficient in having an electric vehicle transferring that power onto the road rather than a petrol or diesel car.

I'm grateful to you for allowing me to make an intervention, because I think that, actually, this is a really important point. I was horrified to see the Dispatches programme last month that exposed the fact that the UK Government is using our precious levy on our electricity bills to substitute coal for wood pellets made from hardwood in the Drax power station, which is obviously one of the biggest power stations in the UK, and that this is actually generating more carbon than the coal. I mean, that is absolutely astonishing. So, I was hoping we might—. I failed to put in an amendment to your three points. I think it needs a fourth point, which is to say that we need to have a network of renewable charging points generated by renewable energy, and hopefully by locally produced renewable energy, so that we get around the network problems that Simon Thomas referred to.

I don't disagree with that at any level; I think that that will be shown on the record as being a pretty good idea. But I come back to that point about the efficiency of electric vehicles in this particular issue, anyway. So, whilst we have the delays in what we'd like in terms of moving towards non-carbon electricity generation, at least EVs is a way to be more efficient.

I don't have much time, actually, to comment on individual points, other than, yes, of course we need a culture change, and yes, we need to change our attitude towards how we travel from one place to the other. I don't worry about the cost, because you buy or lease an electric car and you get the charging point for free. I mean, the cost isn't great; it's about encouraging people by making sure that it's there, initially, when they buy that house, so it makes it a no-brainer, as they might say, to make a purchase of that car instead of petrol or diesel.

I recognise fully that work is going on in Welsh Government in looking at various ways of encouraging EVs. One thing I would say is that the Government hasn't got the best track record, over the years, of being innovative in this. It's great that things are happening now, but it could've happened earlier, and that makes me think that we need all the belts and braces that we can have to make sure that good intentions from Government, now, actually do turn into concrete action on the ground. I was talking, years ago, about the potential for Wales to be leaders in EV. That seems to be a bit of a distant dream, now, we're so far behind. But, if we are playing catch-up now, let's play catch-up really, really hard. Let's make it an ambition and be ready to legislate if necessary, in addition to the use of various planning guidelines and so on, to be able to confidently say, in future, that Wales is an EV-friendly and an EV-ready country.

The proposal is to note the proposal. Does any Member object? Therefore, the motion is agreed in accordance with Standing Order 12.36.