Thank you to Rhun for bringing this motion, because it's certainly a very interesting motion. I'd like to say a few brief comments about it, and I'm broadly in support of the motion.

Just as builders had to wire their new buildings for electricity and modern offices have to be wired for computers et cetera, it makes sense, as technology and society progresses, that planning guidance be adjusted to keep pace. So, I will be supporting this motion, as more people are using electric vehicles and it is the state's role to ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place to facilitate people living their lives.

I do have a couple of concerns, the first one being when it comes to applying this rule to all new houses so that all new homes have to have the points installed. I can see where you're coming from with that but my concern is that the additional cost of having those charging points installed in all new homes will be inevitably passed on to the homebuyer. Homebuyers are already having to pay a premium for new builds. Some people are saying that that effectively cancels out the benefits of any help-to-buy scheme, and any premium that's paid will also be handed on to any tenant. So, burdening people with a forced increase could make it harder for people to find a home. I'm sure the last thing that anybody in this place wants to do is make it more expensive for people to buy a home by pushing up the price of new builds.

The other concern I have, which is a point alluded to by Lee, is that encouraging increased electric car usage at this point does seem to be putting the cart before the horse, since there's a danger of forgetting that most of our electricity is currently coming from polluting power stations, not from renewables. So, the extra electricity required to charge cars will at present do nothing but increase emissions from local power stations and effectively just moves the problem from one place to another.

As has already been said, maybe fewer cars should be used—but we've had 40 years or more of local authorities and Governments building their planning and economic strategy around widespread use of the car. So, saying that people need to drive less is, okay, logical, but it's a very, very difficult thing to achieve in modern society. 

Of course, an electricity supply sourced mainly from clean energy sources could be achieved with the right investment in research and development, but we're not at that stage, and we're nowhere near it yet, and we shouldn't be acting as if we were. I don't believe that the decisive factor in whether or not to buy an electric car is whether you've got a charging point at your house, although it's obviously going to be a factor. The key factors are going to be cost—how far a single charge will carry you—and, for the environmentally minded, how much pollution it will realistically create. For electric cars to become the norm, a revolution is going to have to take place in how far we can travel between charges and the recharge time, and we don't know what the next game-changing step will be for these cars. So, another concern for me is that we may end up bringing in rules that costs the taxpayer and the homeowner a significant sum of money in the long term for charging points that will just be outdated and obsolete before they've ever been used. Thank you.