Professor Hannah Daly:

I will provide a few points of clarification. Certainly EV sales are still growing very strongly but the rate of growth is slowing down. Previously, EV sales were almost doubling every year and now the rate of growth has slowed to about 60%, which is still very strong.

I will make another point on the fossil fuel phase-out plan. We certainly will need to stop selling new fossil-fuel cars as quickly as possible in order to meet our legislative sectoral emission ceilings for transport. The low-hanging fruit is to stop fossil-fuel car sales. At the current rate of 60% growth in EV sales, we are looking at 100% EV sales by 2027 or before. It might be a surprise but that is actually the rate that we would need to reach to meet our carbon budget, along with increasing the import of second hand EVs. There is something of a policy gap in regard to the target gap in terms of incentivising the import of second hand and limiting the import of used fossil-fuel cars.

I have a second point of clarification. I believe there may be a bit of confusion. My opening statement was not proposing to move away from the current VRT policy of taxing based on carbon and N2O emissions; it is to include weight as an additional component in VRT. How that would be designed would need to be examined as to whether, for example, it would be revenue neutral, so we are reducing the cost of lighter cars and increasing the cost of heavier cars like in Norway and France. The idea would be to include this as an additional component because weight in itself is an external cost on society. Depending on one's opinions on that, if one can afford to pay it, one should be paying that external cost back into the public good.

Deputy Farrell asked as well about measures other than taxation and regulation. I mentioned a few already, for example, limiting access to city centres for fossil-fuel cars by a certain date. That would be consistent with the city's net-zero target. We could also, for example, ban cars of a certain weight. Advertising is a very powerful force here. The Government does already regulate advertising. For example, on any car that is advertised, we could also advertise the lifetime carbon emissions from that. People do care about carbon emissions.

We could advertise the weight and also include a disclaimer, for example, that heavier cars are more damaging to vulnerable road users.