Ms Marguerite Sayers:

On the first question concerning the 30,000 chargers, my understanding is that includes workplace and home charging, as well as the number of chargers on the system. Regarding our programme, as I said, the range of vehicles has changed greatly. Typically, it was possible to achieve approximately 100 km per charge, but that has now increased to 300 km or 400 km per charge.

We are changing the nature of our charging infrastructure to reflect the fact that people will want charging support when they are going on much longer journeys. Some 80% of charging happens at home. We are providing a network that provides a charging boost when people need it on longer journeys around the country.

With regard to reacting to demand, we had the first national network anywhere in the world. It was certainly the first that was provided by an electrical utility, so that was unprecedented at the time. We are continuing to work to try to stay ahead of and encourage people to take up electric vehicle ownership. If they are going to buy a car, accepting all the points that the other witnesses gave about walking and cycling, we hope that they will buy an EV and we want to give them the confidence to do that. When we are finished with the roll-out of our current programme, which includes those high-powered charging hubs, then that network, based on our analytics, will be capable of supporting 400,000 EVs, which is a significant increase above the 50,000 EVs in the country at the moment.