On Wednesday the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced to delay the plan on the ban of new petrol and diesel cars in 2030 to 2035, as a result Scotland has said they will now have to also push back plans.
SNP Dave Doogan, the party’s energy spokesman at Westminster was interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme.
Doogan was asked how Sunak’s announcement affects Scotland’s target, he said, “We will have to move to 2035 because even if the Scottish Government did have the authority to intervene in that particular legislation, which is reserved to the Department for Transport and its agencies, principally the DVLA, we are snared in the United Kingdom into the Internal Market Act, which would see the UK Government intervene in any policy undoubtedly which created a difference between the market in Scotland and the market in the rest of the United Kingdom.
“What we’d have to be very careful if we decided to do that is that we didn’t put our motor manufacturing retail business at a strategic disadvantage by operating in a way that was completely different to that which was in England, resulting in cross-border trade to access vehicles that you couldn’t access in Scotland, so it’s a complex dynamic and of course at the base of all of this is the fact that the UK Government didn’t consult the Scottish Government on any of this.”
Doogan said Sunak’s decision to push the ban back to 2035 is an “unprecedented tragedy for the automotive industry in the United Kingdom.”
He said, “The market environment was set out by the Conservative Government in 2020 and industry has been gearing up and tooling up and investing in that market environment, only to find out as of yesterday from the Prime Minister that they’re actually now operating in a completely different environment.
“They’ve been establishing a market supply chain that will provide a greater proportion of electric vehicles by a time of around 2030, where now UK consumers will be in a position to continue to buy internal combustion engine cars, so they’ll have a mismatch between market demand and product availability that they’ve been tooling up for on the basis of Government market instruction.
“I don’t think it can be underestimated how foolish and irresponsible it is for the UK Government to create a market environment and then three years later create an entirely different market environment.”
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