I, too, am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. You are of course right, so without further ado I will get straight down to the amendments.
Amendment 21 is one that I cannot possibly support, but I understand where my hon. Friend is coming from. I am not entirely sure—perhaps the promoter of the Bill
can let us know—but I presume that the Bill, and clause 16 in particular, was introduced to enable the implementation of “An Electric Vehicle Delivery Plan for London”, a document issued by the Mayor in May 2009. I presume that that document was the genesis of the legislation. Clause 16 currently states:
“A London authority may provide and operate charging apparatus for electrically powered motor vehicles”.
The amendment would make that:
“A London authority shall provide”.
It seems to me that the merits of the amendment, as far as the Bill is concerned, can be determined by asking whether or not the clause would fulfil the pledge and the ideas behind the Mayor’s document.
The Mayor’s document sets some ambitious targets for the use of electric vehicles. It states that the delivery plan will
“Work with the boroughs and other partners to deliver 25,000 charge points across London by 2015… including a network of fast charge sites—500 on-street, 2,000 in off-street public car parks, station car parks”.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East knows much more than I do about the number of these things in London and their geography, so perhaps he can say whether the Bill, as currently drafted, with the word “may”, would deliver the numbers set out in the document, or whether it needs the harsher wording, with “shall”, to hit those targets, because the document seems to be the genesis of the Bill. Having said that, whether we agree with the Mayor’s ambitions is a slightly different matter.
My view, for what it is worth, is that we should not compel London local authorities to provide and operate charging apparatus in every public off-street car park, as amendments 21 and 22 propose. There might be no demand in certain parts of some London boroughs. We might not really want local authorities doing it themselves anyway. Perhaps we would like other people involved in provision, not least to get some competition going. Competition, of course, is the best way to drive down prices. I seems to me that the monopoly my hon. Friend envisages, unusually, would not be in the best interests of the consumer or the taxpayer, who might end up paying unnecessarily to have charging apparatus installed in places where it is not needed and never will be. Putting such apparatus in every public off-street car park under the control of the local authority seems extremely demanding. It is something that I cannot support. I urge my hon. Friend not to press amendments 21 and 22, and on that basis, I could not support amendment 23, as it is consequential to amendments 21 and 22.
Unusually, my hon. Friend and I have got off on a bad footing, and the situation is not particularly helped by amendment 24; we may have started off badly with amendments 21, 22 and 23, but we appear to be going downhill rapidly with amendment 24. It would strike out subsection (2), which allows a London authority to
“grant a person permission to provide or operate charging apparatus”—
in effect, on its behalf. It seems that, strangely, my hon. Friend wants to prevent the local authority from introducing any private enterprise, in effect ensuring that all such things are state owned and run. That is an extraordinary state of affairs to be asked to support.
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