Speeches by Smith.

“rose—”

“I have a simple question for the Minister. He keeps stating that 1,000 or so contracts have been signed, nearly all with companies based in the UK, but what percentage of those companies are small or medium-sized enterprises compared with the primes?”

“I realise that it does not have to be, but that is clearly a useful place for it.”

“Government timelines for the EV transition have changed multiple times. Can you guarantee consistency in EV policy in the future to provide confidence to both consumers and the market? I realise we have asked some of those questions indirectly already, but are you completely convinced that that is deliverable?”

“We also have the pay-per-mile scheme coming in. How do you incentivise people when you are also changing the playing field for them? A lot of people have purchased electric vehicles in good faith. Maybe that was naive; of course that was going to change at some point. Particularly to lower income families, how does tha…”

“My second question is linked to my first. On the strategic road network, the roll-out of high-speed charging at petrol stations is not speedy enough. I live just up the road from a petrol station, and there is no EV charger there, and there is nothing in the neighbourhood. I do not know what is being done with LEVI to …”

“Even regions? Do you have it for the south-west, the south-east or the north?”

“Not in terms of policy.”

“That could be an interesting statistic to come back on.”

“How many of those charge points make charging as quick as filling a tank of petrol or diesel?”

“Listening to what you have been saying, a couple of things have been highlighted that lead into my question. Effectively, you are describing a postcode lottery at the moment. Are you near off-road parking that has charging? Has your local authority invested in large-scale charging areas? Are they doing the gullies? If …”

“I completely agree with the Chair. I think we all get that, if you have one, it is great. The problem is that the vast majority of people still cannot have one for an economic reason, for example. It is great that we have heard that some are now under £20,000, but £30,000 for the average family is a lot of money to be …”

“I want to build on that a bit. I think one of the challenges you have—I hate to burst your bubble, Richard—is that, ultimately, it is not just in London that you cannot park outside your house—”

“I grew up on a road where you could park only on one side of the street. I raise that point because my parents have just bought a full hybrid because they will never get to plug a car in outside their home, since they happen to live on the wrong side of the road. Unless you start digging up the whole road, they are not…”

“Minister, you are right to say that things are going well, but you have also talked about “trying to convince the public” that this is something they should do, while maintaining that you can get there by 2030. “Trying to convince the public” does not sound like a mechanism that will get to where you want to be. You ha…”

“To move on to my actual question, we have talked about cross-pavement charging a lot today, and we have talked about it a lot before. I am a former planning committee chair for a local authority, which was resolutely not interested in pursuing the issue despite claiming to be an incredibly green council. I am glad that…”

“Following on from the Chair’s line of questioning, a thought has just come to my mind about the plethora of disabled bays, which links to cross-pavement charging, housing associations and on-street parking. Obviously, people do not have a right to a specific disabled bay but, just as a supplementary question before I l…”

“The question I asked was, does your modelling account for those regional differences? I appreciate it is great that local authorities are doing things, and we know that, because we have had them come in and we all have experiences of that, but my key question was about your data and your mapping. Does your data take in…”

“So there are more non-home-based charging points now than petrol pumps.”

“You need a space that you can sit in for a long time to do that.”