What Can EV Drivers Hope To See In The UK’s Autumn Budget?
We’re here. Well, we’ll be in three weeks. The autumn budget and Richard Reeves has a tricky job ahead of that. This government has made it clear that it wholeheartedly supports the EV transition, whether you like it or not, and this is her first real test of how she’s going to implement that. Last year, she lumbered us with EV drivers with a higher VD uh road tax. Uh but we never expected to drive around using public roads roads for free. Uh hoped maybe but never expected. Otherwise there were a number of small pledges like benefit in kind enhance to 2028 uh and an extra 200 million for EV charging but not much else directly. And since then we’ve got the EV car grant for new EVs under £37,000. But this is her big chance. What could she do? What will she do? And what do EV drivers hope she does? I’m Dave. I’m going to give her some clues before it’s too late. If you’ve got any ideas, leave them down below in the comments. Now, my list is much more for the benefit of the EV transition rather than for specific items that might benefit me personally as an individual. Top of the list for me is stability in the EV transition. It’s the number one priority. We’ve had numerous swings, reversals, counterreversals, plus easy mandate penalties, countless lobbies from the car manufacturing industry, direct grants that come and go, and it has thrown total confusion into the EV world. Confusion leads directly to lack of confidence and people just put off buying decisions until it all settles down. It damages the industry. If, for example, any government even hinted it might impose huge tariffs on a certain country’s EVs, luckily ours hasn’t, that country might think twice about even exporting EVs to that country, and customers would think twice about buying them. Industry needs stability for long-term planning, and long-term plans should be long-term. Well, Legacy Auto, those original car manufacturers like Renault, BMW, VW, Ford, and many others, they’ve spent and lost billions in beginning to make the changes needed to meet EV targets by 2035, only for various governments to buckle under pressure and make changes or remove or ease penalties for those missing the targets. The industry recently smelled fear and panic in EV determination and immediately switched back on mass to making PHEVs which gave them higher profits. That move was purely for them to make more profits rather than for them to provide good, reliable, wellpriced vehicles for their buyers. If they smell fear again, that might buckle it and it will deal a massive blow to both the ICE and the EV industry. Both are affected. ICE new car sales are already collapsing. Legacy knows this. They’re just desperate to keep it going as long as humanly possible to milk as much cash as they can. And this is where they historically have made the most profits. EVs, on the other hand, are on a massive growth curve, but they make no profit at all on these as yet until everyone adapts them and they get into full mass production. To get into profit, they need a 100% commitment to go EV, knuckle down, and just do it. They can head either way, but if given a choice, they will always choose to stick with the status quo and just carry on doing what they’ve been doing for the last 100 years. No change. The government needs to set the path ahead crystal clear. We’re going EV. No detours, no U-turns. Get on with it. Because over the next decade or two, every single car out there, 35 million of them that currently burns fossil fuel, needs to be replaced. That’s an absolutely huge market that they’ve barely scratched, leading to massive employment, massive factories, massive investment, and massive profits. It can breathe life back into the comeomaos and moribund. Yeah, look that one up. ice industry. Well, number two, get the national grid sorted out. The grid is not national and not owned by the government. Is long as being sold off to various private equity companies, pension funds, and investment bankers. These have one thing in common, profit. spend the least possible to meet legal requirements or whatever they can get away with and get the most profit they can out of the company and get that cash out of the bus business as quick as they can and into where it should be. First the directors and executives and then the shareholders. They have little incentive to improve the grid just because it needs improving. Now we saw this recently with water. Those private owners also own mainly owned by funds of one sort or another kept on putting off real investments and improvements while loading them down with absolutely massive debt. Well, that money seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Probably also where that should be, directors, executives, and shareholders pockets. Finally, the sewage system was pretty much on the point of collapse, leaving billions of liters of raw sewage being pumped untreated into the sea rivers and reservoirs, including Lake Windermir until finally off what has been forced to take action. Well, the grid is regulated by offjem which is currently next to useless. If the government is funding or requiring that we have 300,000 EV public chargers by 2035, it must absolutely must require the national grid to keep up with that huge growth. I’ve been out filming EV charges since this channel began nearly 3 years ago. And it is appalling to have to report that some services, motorway services, including some where the chargers have already been installed, like birch services on the M62, are still waiting for the grid to do their bit and provide power to the site. This is disgusting. Offje is the regulator, and they simply must put their foot down. Probably best done with a new CEO. The last one did next to nothing and then demand constant progress or lose their monopoly. Off what simply waited believing everything they were being told right up to the deadline. Only then they discovered that they’d done nothing at all. or offjem needs to demand a detailed plan of how they are going to get there. Incremental progress steps along the way and absolutely massive huge obscene penalties if they ignore them or simply fail to hit those that they’ve promised in the lead up to 2035. Well, number three, around a third of all homes do not have access to off streetet parking in order to charge their EVs. Tiny measures have been taken like easing the restrictions on cross pavement gullies which individual councils and housing associations can and do then just ignore or reject. Should be a legal requirement for all brand new homes to be installed with EV home charges even if that is just an external EV rated weatherproof socket. should also be a legal requirement to retrofit all existing homes where the owner or tenant owns an EV or requests it. If that requires a cable gully, they should be installed within permitted development rights that the council cannot overrule. If for flats, apartments, or pen houses that includes providing EV home chargers in the allocated charging spaces or in an underground garage, so be it. Nobody should be deprived of the right to charge their EV at home and particularly not at the beneficial off- peak charging rates. Number four, public EV charging prices. No, we don’t need to or should nationalize public chargers nor try to control the price they charge. We do have a free market. They can charge whatever they choose, and the public can decide with their feet, better still with their EVs, whether or not to use them. But councils very much need to provide plentiful and affordable public EV charging as a service to the public, not as a profit center. They do get grants from central government to help them. Councils already provide libraries, needleshare facilities, and a host of other essential services totally free of charge and do not demand payment from the council tax paying public. If they want EVs to clean up the air pollution and to improve the health of the public, they must provide EV charging as a service, not as a profit. Too many councils see it as a quick profit center where they can hike up the prices to a pretty much captive audience. They commission a CPO, charge point operator, and allow them to install, run the service, collect the payment in return for a guaranteed high payment, and then they take a cut of the profit. looks great on their books, but it’s merely ripping off the public. Councils must operate these at cost and they must control that cost. I’ve interviewed many businesses that have negotiated electricity rates between 15 p and 20 p. And there are ultra rapid charges out there that only charge 40 or 50 p per kilowatt hour to the customer who must be paying even more. How can a council or council approved CPO be charging 60 or 70p? The only answer is they must be ripping off their council taxpayers. Make EV charging a service and enforce the price they charge. It’s not price fixing. This is council fixing. There’s no problem with employing a CPO to do it for you. Just set the price at cost. The CPO can still find it worthwhile, but council taxpayers will no longer be simply funneling their earnings into both the council and the CPO pockets. By the way, a mass of atcost councilr run charges would do wonders to taming the wild excess profits made by some private CPOS. No names mentioned. You know who you are. Number five, lead the way with all government vehicles being EVs on next renewal. Yeah, nobody expects you to simply ditch perfectly good ice cars currently being used, but when they are due for renewal, they must go electric. And here we see a classic trap. If the government tries to claim, well, they can’t because the charging infrastructure is not good enough. Ha, guess who controls and funds that? You. If they try to claim public charging is too dear. Well, you see what I mean? Any excuse they give is almost certainly down to a decision they as the government has or should have made. They are simply stuck. However, they try to wriggle out of it. We already see countless ambulance and fire cars that have made the switch to EV and they generally report very good things. Ambulances themselves are now being tested uh as fully electric vehicles. Buses and bin lries have largely gone EV. They’re so much cheaper to run if they have access to decent off- peak charging, which most already have like Glasgow first bus depot. And of course, trains are mostly electric. Police cars are also now EVs, as we saw recently in Tesla Manchester service center. And if they pick the right EVs for police chases, few villains in stolen petrol cars will be able to outrun them. Well, if the government is making a change to EVs, then they surely should lead the way. So, that’s my list. I know there’s so much more that could and needs to be done, but these five would mark a paradigm shift in our inevitable transition to a cleaner, cheaper, safer future. I’m Dave [Music]
The UK’s Autumn Budget is approaching, and electric vehicle drivers are eagerly waiting to see what fiscal policy changes will be announced. As the government considers new public finance initiatives, many are hoping for an extension of government grants to support the adoption of EVs. In this video, we will provide our thoughts what EV drivers can hope for from the Autumn Budget, including potential updates on government support for the industry. With Rachel Reeves set to unveil the budget, we will examine the potential implications of the new fiscal policies on the UK’s public finance landscape and what this means for those invested in electric vehicles. The Autumn Budget is a critical moment for the UK’s economic future, and EV drivers will be watching closely to see how the government’s decisions will impact their choices and the environment. Tune in to find out what the UK’s Autumn Budget might hold for EV drivers and the future of public finance in the UK.
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