Environmentally Sustainable Transportation

What new plans he has to incentivise businesses to become more environmentally sustainable in the transportation of their products.

The Government are striving to decarbonise transport by phasing out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, and from 2035 all new cars and vans must be zero emissions at the tailpipe. The plug-in van grant will support businesses to reach net zero by reducing the purchase price of new zero emission vans up to £3,000 for small vans and up to £6,000 for large vans. The plug-in truck grant also provides up to £25,000 of funding for the largest HGVs.

I thank the Minister, and I have a lot of time for her, but she must realise that these heavy goods vehicles—these trucks—are poisoning our atmosphere and poisoning children, pregnant women and elderly people. All of us are being poisoned by these emissions. Can we not move much more quickly to encourage things? There are some really good British manufacturers such as Electra Commercial Vehicles in the north of England, which is doing wonderful work, guided by Sid Sadique, one of our new entrepreneurs. There is a capacity to switch to electric vehicles to deliver all the stuff that we get in this country, and we could do it much faster. Can I beg her to move faster for the environment, for children, for the air that we breathe, and for our commercial industries?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. We are working to ensure that the transport decarbonisation plan is as ambitious as possible, and we plan to publish in the very near future. It will set out how we incentivise operators and industry to transition to zero emission HGVs and manage emissions from the existing fleet. We are also investing £20 million this year in planning for zero emission road freight trials, which will support UK industry to develop cost-effective, zero emission HGVs and their refuelling infrastructure in the UK.