My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on echoing my personal experiences time after time as the driver of an electric vehicle, which I used to be.
I understand that, as we speak, the EV charge points are finally being installed in the Royal Court of the House of Lords. I suspect there are not enough, but at least there will be a charge point or two, so it seems that we can finally speak about these issues in this House without a sense of hypocrisy—demanding of others that they make a provision that we would not even make for ourselves. My thanks to the House for making that decision but, if there are only two charge points, I hope it realises that it will need to add many more very quickly to service the number of people driving electric cars who belong to this House.
As I just implied, I no longer have my electric car, or any car, because a few weeks ago my Nissan Leaf suddenly lost power in the fast lane of the M25. This is apparently not an unexpected feature of the Nissan Leaf reduction box; I cannot tell you how casual the company was about this failure. The car is scrap, and I am alive and uninjured thanks only to some sort of hand of fate, frankly, having tried to manoeuvre on momentum across four lanes of traffic on the M25.
However, I owned an EV for long enough to understand all the trials and challenges of public charging, so well laid out by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I realise that this SI is supposed to redress those. As I read the details, I became more and more disappointed and frustrated.
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I followed up on this when I received a briefing from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders —so it was not just my imagination or analysis. It is a dismaying briefing that looks at the inadequacies of this statutory instrument. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, hit the nail exactly on the head: this SI is too weak a requirement on the public charging provision industry, which is a thriving industry with a growing income that really needs to start taking customer service extremely seriously. Frankly, it will not do so without regulatory pressure.
I go back to the contactless payment parts of the SI. I think we all know that DC charge points, where power from the grid is converted inside the charger, are already contactless. But they are rare and many cars cannot use them. As far as I can see, this statutory instrument is targeted primarily at AC charge points, which are much more common. I accept with some reluctance that the Government decided that the industry would resist retrofitting existing AC charge points, but, before I read the SI, I naively assumed that all new AC charge points would be contactless. How wrong I was. Only new public charge points of 8 kilowatts and above will be required to be contactless, but most AC charge points are 7 kilowatts. If you go to almost any station, you will find a 7-kilowatt charger and a 22-kilowatt charger—that is the basis on which this industry operates. So, as far as I can see, it will be years before any new 7-kilowatt chargers are, or will be required to be, contactless. That virtually guts this part of the legislation.
In addition, the legislation would allow multiple charge points—all of those on a nearby street, for example—to be attached to a single contactless charge point. So drivers could have to walk quite a distance from their cars to pay. I can tell you that, if you have kids, pets or exposed shopping in the car, having to go on a trek to make the payment and then return to the car will discourage so many people and will be a real inconvenience. Frankly, it would also be quite high-risk if you had a sleeping child sitting in the front of your car.
Then we come to payment roaming. The requirement for payment roaming will come into force two years and 23 days hence, which strikes me as extraordinary because it is not an onerous burden to place on the various companies. It is a simple process. I do not understand why drivers will have to wait until 2026 before they can roam across multiple charging networks. Perhaps the Minister could explain the delay.
Perhaps even more importantly, there is the issue of reliability, which exercises so many of us when we drive outside our local area. The SI establishes a minimum rate of 99% reliability—as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, that is across the system, not for each individual charger—but it applies to DC chargers only. AC chargers are exempt, and I do not understand why.
On mapping and price transparency, I am glad that there are some requirements in this legislation, because both of those issues need to be tackled—but they are still going to be pretty inadequate. At the moment, the information is available but is confusing. Price comparison is nearly impossible because it is always on a different basis. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, also mentioned getting to a place where you can see that a charger is not in use but the space is blocked by another car. Things will never be perfect, and I am glad that this issue is in the SI, but I wonder whether it could have been more demanding in how it tackles the problem.
People potentially buying or leasing an EV can usually work out a charging solution in or around their home residences. But those same people are rightly discouraged from getting an EV because of concerns with charging not at home but at their destination, where, typically, the local payment system that they have at home does not work.
I say this as someone who can charge very easily near my home in Barnes but has roved around every public charging point in Sevenoaks trying to find one that I could use. I finally had to nap in the car outside my son’s house until a granddaughter came home and I could plug into their garage. Those kinds of experiences are repeated over and over by people who drive outside their immediate neighbourhoods.
This SI is an opportunity missed. As a Minister in coalition, I had the EV portfolio and dealt with the gushing scorn for the EV agenda of quite a few people from the current governing party. Frankly, without Danny Alexander as an ally in the Treasury, I would not have had a chance of protecting the low-emissions programme. This unambitious attitude seems to continue. Obviously I am not going to vote against this SI—it has some value and some benefits—but I ask the Minister to go back, take up the cudgels and follow up with a further SI that puts proper responsibilities on the charging industry to provide proper customer service.