The Security Institute has royal patronage; the security industry has a well-established regulator, the SIA. One of the few trappings that it lacks is an anthem. A contender would be Cars, by Gary Numan, arguably his finest song, in 1979. The sleeve of the cover of the single (younger readers will have to search the internet to understand any of that) showed Numan pretending to hold an invisible steering wheel. He sang robotically, ‘Here in my car, I’m the safest of all, I can lock all my doors, I keep stable for nights, in cars.’ He was making no more sense by the end: ‘I’m starting to think about leaving tonight, because nothing seems right, in cars.’ Perhaps his words were prophetic, if he was thinking about electric cars, and the ‘path to zero emission vehicles’ as set out by UK Government.
It’s one thing for contractors such as Mitie to make a big deal out of zero emissions, such as turning their own vehicles over to electric power, and another thing for the mass market to go electric. In December 2024, Mitie hailed its 6,000th electric vehicle (EV) in its fleet, unveiled at Westminster by Lilian Greenwood, a Nottingham Labour MP and Minister for the Future of Roads. Peter Dickinson, Chief Legal Officer at Mitie, spoke of ‘making rapid progress on our journey to reaching a zero-emission fleet’. Mitie sees opportunity; in August 2024 it acquired the electrical engineering business, ESM Power, which does grid and power connections, so that Mitie could better serve the market for installing electric charging points. Mitie can also differentiate itself from rivals by providing services for those seeking to be energy-efficient; among its recent facilities management (FM) contract wins was HM Revenue & Customs, which included ‘carbon reduction’. It makes sense, then, for Mitie to run its own facilities on that basis.
A year ago though I was speaking to someone from Mitie who was lamenting that his electric car was economic to use if he charged it at home, given the pence per mile that his employer gave him; but not when he charged his car away from home. This is not to criticise Mitie but to make the wider point that unless using an electric car is as good a deal, and altogether as simple as a petrol or diesel car, it ain’t going to happen. Electric cars have to be as easy to charge and take as little time as it takes to fill your petrol car at a station, or charge your phone.
Kerbs
That Mitie employee was having to charge his car away from home if he journeyed halfway up the country and back. While you could argue that you’d have to fill your car with petrol on such a trip, that still means electric cars will need far more infrastructure than is around, costing however many billions of pounds. We can see from the HS1 rail line from London to Birmingham how a multi-billion engineering project takes ten, 20 years. Most cities of the British Isles – Nottingham, Glasgow, Dublin – either have people living in flats, or otherwise having to park their cars on-street, with a pavement between it and the house. In other words, unless you have electric cable trailing across pavements, the charging points will have to be at the kerb. Either electric cars will have to run for much longer than a day’s commute, or streets filled with parked cars overnight will need one charging point for each car, or else neighbours are going to fall out in a mass. Are these things past, or even at, the public discussion stage? Whatever else ministers say, such as Energy Secretary Ed Miliband (‘accelerating the transition to electric vehicles , ‘our clean energy superpower mission’) is meaningless.
Dates
Yet if anything, the UK Government is becoming more unrealistic. Under Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives in 2023 pushed back a target date for going over to electric vehicles from 2030 to 2035. A public consultation running from last month to next proposes ‘restoring the phase out date of 2030 for new cars with internal combustion engines’.
Photo by Mark Rowe; street art, Camden, north London.
