Greg Smith

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that point, which I have been making for many years. I certainly did so during my time on the Transport Committee in the previous Parliament, and outside this place, as I have engaged with the classic car sector and all parts of the industry. He is right that there is a big innovative drive for sustainable fuels, if I can call them that. Some of them derive from feedstocks, others from waste matter, and they work in the internal combustion engines that we already have—in jet engines as well as motor vehicle engines. There are also entirely man-made synthetic fuels that require no such feedstocks. They do not require food to be grown in order to be burned. There are innovators on that in this country and all over the world. For example, Zero Petroleum, just next door to my constituency—just over the Oxfordshire border at Bicester Heritage—has developed a fuel that works in every jet engine and every internal combustion engine that we enjoy today. It is entirely man-made; it is literally made out of air and water. It is a mixture of green hydrogen with atmospheric carbon capture. However, the ZEV mandate and the approach that the Government are taking in this statutory instrument rule that technology out of order, because there is still carbon at the tailpipe. The regulations ignore the fact that the carbon at the tailpipe is the same volume of carbon that is captured out of the atmosphere to make the next lot of fuel. In fact, a whole-system analysis shows that technology to be carbon-neutral—one volume of carbon is in a perpetual cycle. However, no matter how much Ministers and the Government claim to be technologically neutral, the test at the tailpipe, and the test in this statutory instrument, which explicitly refers to zero emission vehicles, rather than alternatively fuelled vehicles, do in fact mean that the Government pick a technological winner at every step, rather than letting our great innovators innovate.