Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

Debate between Dan Poulter and Stephen Hammond

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Hammond]

My hon. Friend is right to point out that a number of councils are exemplars for charging, but a number of other councils are lagging behind the good example of Havant. I will come to that issue, because one of my key asks is for the Minister to consider what pressure the Department is prepared to put on local councils. I mentioned that we have seen some movement on electric cars, but there are barriers. Perhaps the biggest is accessing charging points and the infrastructure that is available. We have a target of 300,000 charging points by 2030, but we currently have fewer than 39,000. We therefore need a compound increase of 33% over the next seven or eight years to make that a reality. Unless we do more, that target looks challenging.

There are also issues with accessing on-street charging points, of which there is a limited number. We need to change the culture, and part of that is that, although there are huge numbers of funds and suppliers, far too many people think only the public sector should provide charging points. That is wrong. Also, if someone who lives on a road with a limited number of charging points gets home at six or seven in the evening and someone is charging their car, and if it is not a rapid charging point, it will take anywhere between four and eight hours to charge that car. I challenge my colleagues here to say who is going to get up at two o’clock in the morning and move their car so that the charging point becomes available, and who else is going to get up and move their car to that charging point.

We need to make more on-street charging points available. We also need to make some of those on-street charging points accessible to households that are unlikely to be near places where the public installation of on-street charging can happen. I will make the case in a few moments that local byelaws should be changed so that that can become a reality for many people, particularly those in rural areas.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, which I am sure the Minister will respond to in detail in a moment. On rural charging for electric vehicles, it strikes me that in very rural areas, such as many parts of Suffolk in my constituency, the only solution is to make the availability of home charging for each and every household economically viable. Even in a village, it can still be one or 1.5 miles from one end to the other in terms of connectivity. Will he speak more about home charging and what he thinks the Government should do to promote it, particularly in rural areas?

[Stephen Hammond]

My hon. Friend will be pleased to hear that I will make some remarks on that issue and particularly on what can be done. He is right: according to the RAC, the cost of home charging for a rapid vehicle is about 13p per kWh, yet those who use public chargers have seen a 91% increase to something like just over £3 per kWh. That is quite a big discrepancy. Although we have seen progress on on-street charging, the reality of home charging is important.

I want to make some key asks of the Government, some of which will involve direct Government intervention and some of which will involve Government pressure on local authorities to set targets. My first direct ask of the Government is a lobbying point for the Budget. As my right hon. Friend the Minister will know, there is currently a huge discrepancy between the VAT charged when people charge electric vehicles away from home and that charged when people charge them at home. The VAT on public charging is currently 20%, so the inequality between home charging and away-from-home charging is a major impediment. Will the Government look, not only in the forthcoming Budget but in future Budgets, at equalising the VAT rates for on-street away-from-home charging and home charging?

There also needs to be a change in the planning presumptions. We all agree that we need more on-street and on-site parking in terms of retail leisure parks and new in-town developments. The presumption should now be that any and all development comes with the right infrastructure that will allow a far greater number of not only charging points but rapid charging points for electric vehicles. That requires the Government to put some pressure on local authorities, or my right hon. Friend the Minister to work with his colleagues in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to change the planning presumption.

Currently, local authorities are responsible for deciding the locations in their area and securing funding for the delivery of on-street parking. The clear problem at the moment is that only 28% of local authorities have complied with the requirement to have an electric vehicle charging strategy. As I have said, even fewer are working with the large number of infrastructure funds and the providers of funds that would happily work in public-private partnership to work out the number of charging points that can be easily delivered in one year. Some local authorities have made huge progress on that—for example, under its previous Conservative leadership, Wandsworth worked with a major supplier to deliver a huge increase in on-street parking.

Local authorities need to have a strategy and to commit to work with the people who can supply the funding, so one of my asks of the Government is that, with the Department for Transport and DLUHC working together, they put some pressure on authorities to have such a plan in place. We should be pretty clear about what those plans cover: they should cover, as I said, the change in planning presumption and commit to an increase in on-street capacity.

The plans should contain another commitment. Let me address directly the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). All too often, local byelaws prevent home charging. We allow a huge number of utility companies to put wires and pipes across streets, and they do so safely; one of the great local campaigns I have run in my area is to change a local byelaw to allow people to run cables safely across pavements. It could easily be done, via either cable gullies or other protective measures, to allow people to home-charge who do not have access either to off-street parking—because they do not have their own driveway—or to on-street public facilities. A simple change in the byelaw could easily be applied. There are of course safety challenges and public liability challenges, but the reality is that we let utility companies do it every day of the week, all over the country, and a simple change in byelaws would allow a huge number of extra people to access charging infrastructure.

I am trying to set out how, if we want to make the movement to electric vehicles a reality, there are some things in respect of which we as a country need to change the presumption and the DFT and colleagues in DLUHC need to change the culture. I have set out a number of asks for the Government. Changing the byelaws and planning permission is a relatively simple thing they could work on.

Finally, the Government need to think carefully about the 300,000 target. I accept that it is ambitious and difficult to achieve; however, in the second half of this decade, as the culture among vehicle owners moves more rapidly as price barriers are removed and production levels go up, it may well be that the target of 300,000 public charge points is simply inadequate. I ask the Government to commit to looking at that internally in the Department, and to make a written public statement on the need to be more flexible with the target and possibly to increase it.

I said that I would try to concentrate my remarks because we had a wide-ranging debate less than two weeks ago on the expansion of infrastructure, including in respect of home infrastructure, off-street parking, on-street parking in residential areas and on-site parking in non-residential areas. Removing the barriers to the expansion of those facilities would dramatically increase the opportunity for more people to switch to electric vehicles. I look forward to hearing from the Minister.