Concern borough is ‘lagging behind’ on electric vehicle chargers

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On-street charging systems for electric vehicles could be an option for Caerphilly if trials in neighbouring areas are successful.

The county borough council’s environment committee heard concerns Caerphilly is “lagging behind” in supporting residents to charge cars outside their homes.

Cllr Adrian Hussey said Blaenau Gwent and Newport were trialling systems that allowed cables to be run to vehicles through gullies or channels in pavements.

Some residents in his ward had been “threatened” for leaving cables outside their homes, Cllr Hussey told the committee.

He said the council should “want people to buy electric vehicles and charge them”, but claimed “nothing seems to be done about it”.

Marcus Lloyd, Caerphilly’s director of infrastructure services, said the council had previously decided against testing out chargers in gullies, but would seek feedback from the other local authorities on the success of their trials.

“We are not dragging our feet, we just want to be confident”, said Mr Lloyd, adding Caerphilly officers are in contact with their counterparts in Blaenau Gwent and Newport over the schemes.

Cllr Shane Williams, chairing the meeting, said chargers in residential streets could pose problems and competition for space.

And Cllr Jamie Pritchard, the cabinet member for climate change, accepted it could be “difficult to implement chargers, especially in terraced streets”.

The debate came during a discussion of a new Local Area Energy Plan for the county borough, in which it will work with other councils on a “vision for a decarbonised energy system”.

But another committee member, Cllr Bob Owen, raised concerns the council may not reach its target of producing “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2030.

Cllr Owen suggested “we haven’t got the amount of funding that we need” to reach that target, and instead said Caerphilly Council should “have a look” at its progress in five years’ time, rather than focus solely on the net-zero goal.

But Cllr Jamie Pritchard, the authority’s deputy leader and cabinet member for climate change, said he was “not prepared at all to roll back on our commitment” to net-zero, which he said had won the support of “all but one councillor” when a so-called climate emergency was declared in June 2019.

Council decarbonisation officer Heather Richardson said that target was the Welsh Government’s ambition for the nation’s public sector, and was “not something we’ve set for ourselves”.