Transcript of evidence to the Environment and Climate Change Committee on electric vehicles

Environment and Climate Change Committee

Uncorrected oral evidence: Electric vehicles

Wednesday 25 October 2023, 10 am

Members present: Baroness Parminter (The Chair); Baroness Boycott; Baroness Bray of Coln; Lord Bruce of Bennachie; Lord Grantchester; Lord Lilley; Lord Lucas; The Duke of Wellington; Lord Whitty; Baroness Young of Old Scone.

Witnesses

I: Peter Ollivere, Policy Team Leader (Spatial Policy), Durham County Council; Dr Chris Pateman-Jones, Chief Executive Officer, Connected Kerb EV Charging Solutions; Shamala Evans-Gadgil, EV Infrastructure Programme Manager, Consultant working on behalf of Coventry City Council; Ian Cameron, Director of Innovation and Customer Service, UK Power Networks.

Extract

Baroness Bray of Coln: There are issues for pedestrians, are there not, about wires going across pavements to reach cars?

Shamala Evans-Gadgil: There are other solutions coming in the market, like gully channels in the footway. However, different authorities have different views on that from a maintenance perspective. Who is liable if there is a trip or something happens? These things need to be looked at, but there are good solutions coming in the market.

Coventry has a lot of properties that are perpendicular to the road and really close to the footpath, and people are very tempted to bring the wire straight from their home. We are looking at providing the gully channel solution there.

With blocks of flats, we are providing chargers on-street, because quite often they park on-street. If there is a communal space available, as the authority we have taken the active step of making sure that we are providing chargers on those streets. If there is a communal off-street facility available to these blocks of flats, it is the landlord who needs to provide, not the local authority, because it is private land, and local authorities will not get involved.

Dr Chris Pateman-Jones: There are some great examples out there. In Lambeth Council close to here, some council properties have blocks of flats again with communal parking spaces. It surprised us, and again it led us to invest into the digital side of our business, because you may not expect some of those estates to have high utilisation or to be early adopting of EV, but it was completely counter to what we expected. They are some of our highest utilised assets.

Full hearing