Lord Whitehead (Lab)

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions and in particular the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for his very constructive contribution. As he rightly points out, this proposal originated with the previous Government but, I think, fell at the time of the general election—it had started to go through the House. The present Government have been able to take that original proposal and have some extensive consultations and discussions with industry and various other key actors in this field to make sure that the fuel finder was as streamlined and as effective as it could be. That is the form in which it comes before us today. In terms of the regulations coming in in February, the aim is to make sure that this proposal comes in by the end of the year but, as the noble Earl will appreciate, there is a large number of technical issues to resolve in order to meet that date. What I can best say today is that there is an aim to do that by the end of the year and we hope that will be possible. I hope the noble Earl will understand that there is a lot of work to get this in place and we hope that will be finished in time for that target date to be achieved. When the fuel finder was originally introduced, there was some suggestion that availability at the pumps should be included among the things that petrol stations had to provide. However, following substantial consultation and considerations of the practical challenge of reporting fuel unavailability—officials did conduct a thorough analysis—it was decided to postpone that and remove the requirement from the fuel finder scheme. But, as I have emphasised, that is a question of postponing and removing for the time being. If a number of those really practical difficulties can be resolved, that might be something for the future as far as the scheme is concerned, but what the Government wanted to do was make sure that we could introduce a practically implementable and early actionable scheme so that we could get this running on an open access data arrangement as soon as was conceivably possible. I do, however, understand the noble Earl’s concerns. I happen to have an electric car, so perhaps I am a little outside the considerations in this instrument, but I know the problems of an electric car owner thinking that they have found an electric charge point only to find that someone else has been using it for the past three hours and they cannot get near it. There are measures in the industry to resolve that sort of problem, so this is something worth looking at for the future. I emphasise that the first three months of those technicalities will be until early May. The CMA’s emphasis, as the enforcer, will be on supporting businesses to comply with the new regime rather than enforcement, as I have said, so there will be a period coming in to make sure that the scheme works well and that everybody is undertaking it properly. This scheme is well founded—I welcome the support that has been given to it by the noble Earl and the party opposite—and I am sure that, with a good wind from everybody in this place, it can be in place as soon as possible, to the benefit of motorists across the country.