Extract from Budget debate: EV Charging - Mar 17

The UK is way off track to meet its own climate change targets and is further still from meeting its commitments under the Paris climate agreement. This failure is being driven by a rising trend in emissions caused largely by increased traffic growth, which has left transport as the UK’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and the worst-performing sector when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. This failure is the result of deliberate Government policy encouraging traffic growth through an ever-expanding multibillion-pound programme of road building.

This Budget is destined to make the problem worse by pledging over £27 billion for new road building, which will increase car use, worsen congestion and increase air pollution and climate emissions, with little benefit for the economy and at the expense of concreting over large areas of the country. A huge part of the problem is that public transport fares have risen at more than twice the rate of wages since 2010 while fuel duty has remained frozen, meaning the cost of public transport has risen above the cost of motoring, discouraging more sustainable transport and worsening congestion and pollution. Yet the fuel duty freeze continues and there are no measures to reduce the cost of public transport, compounding the failure of recent years.

The contrast between what will be spent on new road building alone and what is pledged for cycling and walking and for public transport illustrates the Government’s priorities, with the investment in roads five times that in sustainable transport. The funding for local transport that the Government announced with significant fanfare simply will not cut it. Labour pledged £6.5 billion over the same period to reverse more than 3,000 bus route cuts in England and to invest in new services. It could cost around £3 billion to reverse the cuts made to bus services alone, yet the £5 billion pledged in the Budget is meant to fund bus services, build new cycle lanes and purchase around 4,000 zero-emission buses. This fund has been over-promised and will not deliver the investment in local transport needed to address the climate crisis and support local economies.

On electric vehicles, it is good that the Chancellor decided to continue the grants. It would have been highly damaging for the plug-in car grant to be scrapped, as subsidies for EVs are required until the up-front cost of EVs reaches price parity with internal combustion engine vehicles. But it should be pointed out that the grants had previously been cut from £5,000 to £3,500—a move condemned by industry. If the UK is to reduce transport emissions in line with climate targets, the cuts to grants should be reversed. By contrast, Labour had pledged to introduce 2.5 million interest-free loans, worth an additional £1,500, for the purchase of EVs so as to allow low-income households, those living in rural areas, and independent contractors and small and medium-sized enterprises to save on new electric cars.

Again, the £500 million investment in EV charging infrastructure is better than nothing, but £400 million of this fund is a reannouncement from the 2017 autumn Budget. This money should have already been invested and should have been supplemented by a further announcement in this Budget so as to provide an adequate charging network. By contrast, to jump-start the transition to electric cars and tackle the climate emergency, Labour pledged to invest £3.6 billion in a mammoth expansion of the UK’s EV charging network. A rapid roll-out of charging stations would eliminate concerns over driving range and lack of electric car charging infrastructure by providing enough electrical charge points for 21.5 million electric cars—65% of the UK’s fleet—by 2030...