National Infrastructure Commission: Baseline Report

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for giving us this excellent opportunity to debate these important issues. It is important to bear in mind that the Climate Change Committee has recently made the point that we as a nation are nowhere near restricting our CO₂ emissions to the level that we need to achieve a 1.5 degree increase, which is what is needed. My comments today will concentrate entirely on transport-related issues.

Last week, we had the shapeshifting announcement of the integrated rail plan, which was slated across the north of England as a huge disappointment. The National Infrastructure Commission’s reports, statements and conclusions are important because they identify transport as the sector that has the most potential to reduce disparities in wealth across the country. The NIC concludes that urban transport connectivity is poor in many places and that the largest towns and cities have the worst connectivity, with congestion slowing journeys. It points out that improving urban mobility and reducing congestion can boost urban productivity and hence prosperity. That makes last week’s integrated rail plan, with its downgrading of the investment potential in the north of England, all the more worrying.

The NIC report points out that 33% of total UK emissions in 2019 were transport emissions. Of those transport emissions, two-thirds came from surface transport and one-third from aviation and shipping. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has already mentioned, since 1990 surface transport emissions have stubbornly remained at similar levels despite technological improvements. That has happened simply because there is far more traffic around.

Surface transport emissions come from road transport, of course, as well as rail. However, the number of passenger journeys on rail transport has more than doubled since 1990, but, at the same time, there has been a significant reduction in emissions from railways. We can see that a transition from car ownership to public transport is vital if we are to deal with emissions issues.

Within public transport, rail expansion is of course important, but it takes a while to build a railway; it is much quicker to get people on to buses and to improve a bus fleet from an environmental point of view. We have the technology to move to electric and hydrogen buses.

The Government’s bus strategy has welcome and ambitious aims, but the price tag that they have attached to it is far too modest. The first round of bids is in for funding, which is to be spent largely on zero-carbon buses. There are more than 70 local authorities. Roughly 40 of them have made bids. Four of them alone will mop up the total funding that has been made available. The Government promised us 4,000 zero-emission buses. That sounds really good, but we have to bear in mind that there are 38,000 buses on the road, so what will happen about the other 34,000? The Government still have a roads programme of £27 billion. A quarter of that amount, if spent on zero-emission buses, would deal with the whole problem.

Realistically, we cannot deal with this topic of transport without referring to the need for a stronger government lead in the transition to electric vehicles. Their target is fine, but there is as yet no path to it. Earlier this week in Grand Committee, we considered a modest SI that started to tackle the core problem: the infrastructure for charging EVs. The SI was simply about smart charging, so really it was just about stretching the grid as far as possible—and it was pretty optimistic in what was thought to be possible. Many EV owners have no possible access to charge points at their homes, so they rely on the public realm. It is essential that the right mix of speeds of chargers in the right locations is provided. People rapidly learn where those chargers are and what suits their needs, but the big psychological stumbling block still to be tackled is long-distance routes. People will not buy EVs unless they can rely on chargers being as easily accessible and available as diesel and petrol.

The SMMT has recently produced statistics. One charger is being installed for every 52 new electric vehicles. That is not a sustainable position. The really worrying statistic is that the ratio of vehicle charge points to plug-in vehicles has deteriorated by 31% in the last year. We have one of the worst ratios in major global EV markets, behind South Korea, the Netherlands, China, France, Belgium and Japan. This has to be fixed, and it needs not just money but government leadership in terms of a structure of regulation and leadership of the private sector for investment.