Road Vehicles and Non-Road Mobile Machinery (Type-Approval) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her explanation of these regulations and recognise the urgent need to get them through in time for the end of the transition period, so I intervene not to oppose or amend the transposition, but to get a clearer idea of how the Government intend to proceed in this area, once we have a so-called independent system of regulation, and to put these regulations in a wider context.

My first concern relates to the degree to which any future revisions of these regulations can, in reality, be completely unilateral here in the UK. For example, just this week, the Government announced that they intend to phase out all new diesel and petrol cars by 2030. Presumably, in advance, the Government will tighten the regulations in stages to make a smooth transition away from fossil-fuel-based cars and lorries by making the worst carbon emitters, in effect, illegal first and then by making, in stages, all new vehicles, whether manufactured here or imported, illegal from 2030. Can we do that if the EU is not doing so on the same timescale or in the same stages?

The vast majority of cars and commercial vehicles registered in this country are made by EU-based companies, such as Volkswagen, Renault, Volvo and BMW, or by non-EU companies that have Europe-wide subsidiaries, such as Honda, Toyota, Ford and General Motors. Car production systems are, in effect, an integrated European shop floor, in which different components are produced in different countries, with assembly in different places according to the model. They are traded across Europe without regard to their final assembly location.

In the emissions area, EU regulations are, perhaps notoriously, set with the interests of German manufacturers firmly in mind. That is unlikely to change much after Brexit. It is possible, nevertheless, that the EU’s new commitments on climate change will impose tougher regulations on new models. It is possible, but not certain and probably not likely. So how, in this integrated world of cross-border manufacturing and trading of new models, is it possible for UK carbon-emissions limitations to be seriously out of sync with EU-regulated limits? I am talking about the 10-year period from now until 2030. In reality, can the UK move to tighter limits than Europe during that run-in period? If not, the target to phase out all new fossil-fuel-based vehicles by 2030 looks seriously more difficult.

Another query relates to integrating limits on carbon emissions, as the second and third regulations here do, with other vehicular emissions under air quality rules. In a different context, the Government have already announced in the Environment Bill that they will at some point require levels for area-based exposure limits on a number of exceedances of noxious emissions, from NOx and NO₂ to particulates, in a way that would be better than current EU standards and closer to the WHO recommended maximum. At this point, I declare my honorary presidency of the Environmental Protection UK charity.

There are other sources of air pollution but clearly the biggest contributors to excess pollution and most level exceedances are vehicle emissions and the concomitant traffic problems. While the origins of particulates in the combustion system are different from carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, the filtering systems are not very different. The engineering therefore could be combined. The history of successive phases of government attitudes towards diesel shows that, if not managed properly, there can be a conflict between air quality ambitions and carbon reduction ambitions. Would it not be better to seek a unified system of regulation and specification to cover all vehicle emissions? Are the Government considering this either unilaterally or with the EU or, indeed, the Japanese and American regulatory authorities? If not, why not?

Underlying all this, in all vehicular emission regulations are the Government really committed to an enhanced system of real-world testing of the actual level of emissions on the road, rather than relying on the results of laboratory trials? These are conducted largely by the manufacturers and, as we saw in the Volkswagen case, the results can be illegally distorted by them. Unless we guarantee the real-world accuracy of emissions claims, no amount of improvement in the regulations will deliver, in terms of either carbon saving or cleaner, healthier air.