As part of the news brand’s long-standing ‘Plug It In’ campaign, it launched the second phase of its push for more London motorists to go electric with a major report calling for key measures to help drive change
The Evening Standard published a 10,000-word white paper on Thursday, gathering the best ideas from its Plug It In expert summit last November and setting out how to remove the roadblocks preventing London from becoming fully electric.
The paper, titled “The Evening Standard roadmap for driving the electrification and decarbonisation of London’s transport”, called for a series of essential interventions, including:
- Removing VAT on public chargers
- Capping premium rates on rapid chargers
- Outlining the importance of hitting 2030 targets for improving air quality and the need to go electric
- Devising an Oyster-style card giving Londoners access to all charging points and a flat rate across the city
- Educating Londoners about how and where to charge electric cars and building confidence in the charging network
- Overcoming resistance to electric vehicles by encouraging test drives
- Making it easier for companies to build chargers — and harder not to
- Removing petrol and diesel cars from London as soon as possible
- Lobbying for the reinstatement of electric vehicle subsidies
- Growing the second-hand market to make electric cars more affordable
The ‘Plug It In’ initiative aims to help clean up the capital’s air by getting more drivers to move away from petrol and diesel cars and instead towards zero tailpipe emission vehicles, working with the motoring industry to ensure the right legislation and infrastructure is in place to help make the electric dream a reality.
It comes after campaigners gathered on Wednesday night to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death on her death certificate. Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, who gave evidence at Ella’s inquest, described her death as a “canary in a coalmine” for the way it sounded the alert on the toxic mix of pollutants in the air.
Read more about the report and the ‘Plug It In’ campaign here.
