Speeches by Mayer.

“You just said that there was no incentive, in effect, to invest because everything is full already. If facilities are better, can you not charge more and therefore the investor might make a return?”

“Do lorry drivers ever pre-book their spaces or is it all turn up and pay and display?”

“Maybe they could be incentivised.”

“Lots of letters are late. One that stood out to me, which a constituent raised, was a parking fine that had almost doubled in price by the time it arrived. Locally, the Royal Mail tells me that it is recruiting 12 new postal workers, but if that does not fix the problem, what should we try next?”

“I recently ran a survey in a local school and asked the children what they thought they would be doing if they were not spending as much time on smartphones. About a third of them said they thought they would be reading more if they were on social media less, so I am really pleased that the Government are running a con…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I want to put it on the record that Paddington is my favourite bear, and I have a large poster of Paddington in Westminster in my office, so I do not want people to get the wrong end of the stick and think he is only liked by certain other parties. In the ea…”

“Young coach drivers are severely limited in the distances they are allowed to drive. Trying to get to London from your constituency, Madam Deputy Speaker, they would only make it as far as Sheffield. The Government have recently closed a consultation on this issue. Could the Leader of the House let us know when we will…”

“Is there also an opportunity as well as a risk? I remember that at the Labour party conference—Ruth, you might have been to it too—there was a campaign of tourist attractions installing EV points; it was called Bon VoyCharge, which was a good name. It was very much selling them as something not only that would help the…”

“They have—which coaches are excluded from.”

“Do Government need to have a policy specifically for the coach industry, to perhaps suggest what kind of vehicles it might have or to try to work out where some of this high-powered charging at service stations for their 50-odd passengers should be?”

“I take slight issue with that, in the sense that buses obviously have fixed routes; coaches tend to do various different journeys, so there is a difference between bus and coach infrastructure.”

“That was a bit of a discussion about the main differences in the challenges between charging for cars versus HGVs. Could you now touch on HGVs versus coaches for me, please? Who wants to start? Wesley, you are looking keen on that one.”

“It would appear that in continental Europe it is going to be fine to drive from Germany to Switzerland, and yet driving between Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire might well be different.”

“Should our Government have similar targets nationwide?”

“Esme, going back to my earlier point, if we have all these individual local authorities individually deciding what they are going to put in, does that not harm the user experience? As Nicole has just said, you end up driving literally over the border, out of Bedfordshire into Cambridgeshire, and it is an entirely diffe…”

“Is there not also a legal guarantee of coverage every 60 km within the EU regulations, as opposed to what we have in our regulations?”

“Looking across the channel, our European neighbours and partners have introduced regulations to try to improve availability, reliability and interoperability. Do you think there are lessons to be learned, and should the UK Government be following suit?”

“They might not want to, but it might be a good idea. Does anyone else have anything to add to that?”

“Right, okay. Understood. Building on the role of highways authorities and local authorities, they have a co-ordinating and enabling role. Are they best placed to be doing this, or might it be argued that they are a bit small and that we keep reinventing the wheel in lots of different parts of the country? Perhaps Esme,…”

“Who did they seek advice from that came back inconclusive?”