Speeches by Mather.

“Thank you, and welcome to the Committee. That is an incredibly important point. On what the ECG facilitates, and how that allows lower and middle-income households to take part in the EV transition, around 100,000 vehicles have been sold through the ECG. You can have up to £3,750 off the cost of a new electric vehicle.…”

“I will let you answer that, Richard.”

“The OBR said that it expects 320,000 of the 440,000 EV sales impacted by the introduction of eVED to be offset by the measures announced in the Budget in 2025. If you combine that with the suite of measures we are bringing forward to incentivise EV uptake, suddenly that picture looks quite different from some of the ca…”

“It is a totally fair question. Facilitating the transition is not just about one piece of the puzzle; you need to get the charging infrastructure right, and you also need the incentives on the overall price point of the electric vehicle. There is a much broader conversation, which I will not pre-empt because I presume …”

“No, it is a balance between both things. You cannot facilitate the transition and then not continue to maintain the network on which these EVs run.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I do see where you are coming from, but at the same time the ZEV mandate and the policy measures that we are implementing are designed to facilitate the broadest possible uptake of EVs over an ambitious timeline. We cannot keep deferring decisions about how you continue to fund critical infrastructure on the road netwo…”

“Might it be worth pointing to the consultation?”

“Yes. That is not to say that there are no challenges in meeting it. Debate is ongoing within the automotive sector. I was at SMMT Electrified a few weeks ago and got some robust questions on this exact point. I do not think people in the automotive sector doubt the principle of the 2030 phase-out date—in fact, it serve…”

“Thank you very much for that question. The short answer— I will go into in more detail—is that we are confident that it is moving at the pace required. That does not mean that there is not an enormous amount of work to do. I am certainly under no illusion, as Minister, about the scale of the challenge. In 2025, the UK …”

“Oh no, I certainly don’t want to give the impression that everything is fine, and we are just going to leave it to evolve as it wishes to. The Government are actively working in partnership with the charge point sector, for instance, to drive the transition, because that is necessary. We are trying to convince the publ…”

“Absolutely.”

“You do well to correct me, Chair—thank you.”

“The challenge is that EVs are heavier vehicles across the board, by the nature of their design.”

“Good morning, Chair and Committee members. I am Keir Mather, the Minister for Aviation, Maritime and Decarbonisation at the Department for Transport.”

“I don’t think so, because the Government made changes to ensure that the ZEV mandate does what it is supposed to, which is allowing us to meet our climate obligations while also making a good business case for the automotive sector. What has not changed is the timelines. That is the key difference between the previous …”

“I agree completely. That is why we are taking a diverse suite of policy measures in hand immediately to facilitate that.”

“It is an interesting counterfactual. If Opposition MPs and other people in the broader stakeholder sector looked at the counterfactual to the way that we have gone about introducing the eVED scheme now, and if we got further down the road of mass adoption and with, say, a year to go before the scheme needed to be imple…”

“I just repeat that timelines have not changed under this Government. I am cognisant of the point you made about the different track that was taken under the last Government, because they could see the ambition and the challenge inherent in facilitating this transition. This Government are not interested in walking away…”