Government hasn't hit its own EV fleet targets despite pushing motorists to electric cars

The Government isn't meeting its own EV targets, despite pushing motorists towards electric cars by increasing taxes and running costs of hybrid, petrol and diesel.
It pledged to electrify 25 per cent of the central government car fleet by 2022.
In April the Government further pledged all central government cars and vans (except for the Prime Minister's gas-guzzling Range Rovers) will be zero emissions by the end of 2027.
But new research from WhatCar? reveals the Government is falling short of its targets to electrify its fleets, with only 15 per cent of its cars and vans being pure electric.
WhatCar? obtained information about 7,116 cars and vans operated by 21 central government departments via Freedom of Information requests, with the data received showing 22 per cent of cars are currently pure electric EVs and just 4 per cent of vans are, pulling down the overall total.
The figures suggest many government fleets have so far switched to lower-emission vehicles, such as plug-in hybrids and hybrids, with 22 per cent plug-in hybrids and one per cent hybrids across the fleet.
That leaves 3 per cent of vehicles powered by petrol and 59 per cent fuelled by diesel.
Motorists are being actively pushed into fully-electric cars rather than hybrids after the Treasury massively hiked the cost of owning and running a hybrid car two months ago in order to hit targets to phase out the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030.
The Government has given its fleets the opportunity to apply for exemption – which had to be filed by 31 May - for certain vehicles from going electric due to security and other reasons. These will be confirmed by 31 July.
However, the WhatCar? figures already take into account vehicles that are likely to gain exemption from the EV commitment because it only includes cars and vans weighing up to 3,500kg.
Across the central government fleet results, 35 per cent of cars are PHEVs, but there are zero plug-in hybrid vans. In fact, 96 per cent of vans are diesel.
And the detailed results clearly show that some central government fleets are doing better than others at going green, with the DVLA responding 88 per cent of its cars and 67 per cent of its vans are electric.
The DVSA on the other hand has only 11 per cent electric cars, and no pure electric vans.
All of National Highways' 10 vans are electric, and while only 15 per cent of its cars are EVs, 84 per cent are PHEVs and just two per cent are diesels which marks it out as a better performing fleet.
Comparatively the Ministry of Justice has 16 per cent EVs, but the majority are hybrid or PHEV: 44 per cent and 52 per cent respectively. 1,189 of its vans are diesel, as are 19 per cent of its cars.
Border Force, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Home Office didn't respond or provide enough information to be included, and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities and the Wales office have no vehicles.
National Highways recently took a delivery of 91 Toyota bZ4X electric SUVs. These only make up a fraction of this government department's 1,300 fleet of vehicles
The failure to hit its own EV targets comes after the Chancellor's Spring Budget hikes in Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) road tax for plug-in hybrids and hybrids of up to 1,000 per cent.
On 1 April the first-year VED rate for cars emitting 1-50g/km of CO2 rose from £10 to £110, while cars emitting 51-75g/km of CO2 went from paying £30 to £130. Many plug-in hybrids and self-charging hybrids fall into these brackets.
But others, like the Toyota Yaris hybrid fall into even higher CO2 categories; the 76-90g/km and 91-100 g/km categories.
The lowest first-year VED rate for petrols and diesel with emissions of 76-90g/km shot up from £135 to £270.
But the Yaris hybrid puts out 91g/km CO2 at least and so owners are having to pay £330 now in road tax compared to £165 before 1 April.
Experts have labelled it a 'shove, not a nudge' towards EV uptake.
INCREASE IN VED FIRST-YEAR 'SHOWROOM TAX' RATES FOR NEW CARS FROM 1 APRIL 2025
CO2 (g/km) Petrol & diesel cars now Petrol & diesel cars from 1 April 2025 Alternative fuel (self-charging and plug-in hybrid) cars now Alternative fuel (self-charging and plug-in hybrid) cars from 1 April 2025
0 £0 £10 £0 £10
0 50 10 £110 £0 £110
51 75 £30 £130 £20 £130
76 90 £135 £270 £125 £250
91 100 £175 £350 £165 £330
101 110 £195 £390 £185 £370
111 130 £220 £440 £210 £420
131 150 £270 £540 £260 £520
151 170 £680 £1,360 £670 £1,340
171 190 £1,095 £2,190 £1,085 £2,170
191 255 £1,650 £3,300 £1,640 £3,280
226 255 £2,340 £4,680 £2,330 £4,660
Over 255 £2,745 £5,490 £2,735 £5,490
It's not just VED rates that are forcing people to go electric; company car tax changes – the rates for PHEVs will go up at a rate of 1 per cent increase for each year for the next three financial years – and other fees such as the increase congestion charge for PHEVs to £15 in 2021 have made hybrids far less appealing proposition for drivers.
WhatCar? says it believes it is 'completely wrong' the Government is 'not cleaning up its own fleet at the same time it is penalising ordinary drivers for not going electric by slapping higher taxes on low-emission alternative vehicles'.
Industry figures have also been unimpressed with the Government's lack of incentives, as grants for early adopters have long ended, and EV owners are now liable for VED levies as well as the expensive car supplement on EVs costing more than £40,000.
Defra began its electric vehicle transition back in 2011 when the Environment Agency took on its first full electric car, the Mitsubishi i-Miev. In 2024 over half of EA's fleet of 2,500 cars are full electric, while 214 of its 1,562 vans are also zero emission
Buyers of new EVs over this threshold are having to cough up an extra £425 on top of VED hikes for going electric.
This has been so unpopular that a leaked letter from the Minister for the Future of Roads, Lilian Greenwood, suggested the Government could increase the threshold from £40,000 to £50,000 to offer a respite and help drive uptake.
While this was described as 'move in the right direction' it is not enough to improve consumer confidence, with WhatCar? backing calls for better financial incentives, such as halving the VAT on new EVs, and reduced VAT on public EV charging costs, to make it easier and more appealing for motorists to switch to EVs.
This is Money has contacted the Department for Transport for comment.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

The Independent

20 minutes ago

• The Independent

Middle East situation ‘perilous', says Lammy amid calls for more talks

The situation in the Middle East is 'perilous', the Foreign Secretary said as he urged Iran to negotiate with the US. David Lammy flew from Washington to Geneva on Friday to meet Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi alongside his French and German counterparts as the UK continued to press for a diplomatic solution to the Middle East crisis. The talks followed US President Donald Trump's announcement that he would delay a decision on joining Israeli strikes against Iran for up to two weeks. Speaking after the meeting, Mr Lammy told reporters: 'It is still clear to me, as President Trump indicated yesterday, that there is a window of within two weeks where we can see a diplomatic solution.' Urging Iran to 'take that off ramp' and talk to the Americans, he said: 'We have a window of time. This is perilous and deadly serious.' He added that the US and Europe were pushing for Iran to agree to zero enrichment of uranium as a 'starting point' for negotiations. But Mr Araghchi said Iran would not negotiate with the US as long as Israel continued to carry out airstrikes against the country, and insisted his country's nuclear programme was entirely peaceful. Both sides continued to exchange fire on Friday, with Iranian missiles targeting the city of Haifa while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tel Aviv's military operation would continue 'for as long as it takes'. Meanwhile, the UK Government has announced it will use charter flights to evacuate Britons stranded in Israel once the country's airspace reopens. Mr Lammy said work is under way to provide the flights 'based on levels of demand' from UK citizens who want to leave the region. The move follows criticism of the Foreign Office's initial response, which saw family members of embassy staff evacuated while UK citizens were not advised to leave and told to follow local guidance. The Government said the move to temporarily withdraw family members had been a 'precautionary measure'. On Friday, the Foreign Office announced that UK staff had also been evacuated from Iran, with the embassy continuing to operate remotely. But the Government continues to advise British nationals in the region to follow local advice, rather than urging them to leave. The US evacuated 79 staff and families from the embassy in Israel on Friday local time, according to the Associated Press. Mr Trump told reporters his national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard was 'wrong' when she told lawmakers in March that US intelligence officials did not believe Iran had been building a nuclear weapon. The president also suggested it would be 'very hard to stop' Israeli strikes on Iran to negotiate a ceasefire.

Auto Car

22 minutes ago

• Auto Car

Who needs a city car when you can rent a golf buggy?

The brains behind the Yo-Go buggies is Samuel Bailey. The automotive engineer wanted to give Londoners an alternative to the expensive electric car and found the answer in China, where the buggies are built by a company called Marshell. Each has a small 5kWh battery powering a 4kW electric motor and giving a range of 30 miles. Charging is via London's lamp-post network or a roof-mounted solar panel, which, after a day's sunshine, can provide a six-mile top-up. However, for all its clever electronics, a Yo-Go buggy is still a golf cart, right? In fact, the vehicle is homologated for UK roads, so it's now classified as an L6e quadricycle. Its body has been redesigned, too, to make it more practical and weatherproof. Even so, my fear of being the laughing stock of the capital's road users is not helped by the sight of my test buggy awaiting me at Yo-Go's Parsons Green parking spot. The small vehicle looks only a couple of rungs up the evolutionary ladder from the rickshaws that clog London's West End. And what city needs yet another electric 'personal mobility' solution? My scepticism isn't helped by the buggy's questionable weather protection, its basic plastic interior (although the two seats look comfortable) and its twin rear-mounted boots, which can't be locked. At least the foot pedals marked 'Stop' and 'Go' appear to be foolproof and, save for indicators and a windscreen wiper, there are few extras to distract the inexperienced driver. Driving the buggy is just a case of 'unlocking' it, belting up, selecting D for drive and pressing the Go pedal. Thanks to its low weight, the buggy surges forward effortlessly; helped by fairly aggressive brake regen, it stops easily too. Independent front suspension absorbs the worst of the area's battered roads, and although the buggy is narrow, its track is just wide enough to clear speed cushions.

Telegraph

26 minutes ago

• Telegraph

The week that showed why voters are so angry with Britain's politicians

If you were to try and sum up the British state this week, you would be spoiled for choice. After a few days in which failure after failure came to light – from the damning review into the official response to grooming gangs to the slow-motion crash of the High Speed 2 project to the ability of pro-Palestine activists to damage RAF planes on an airfield unhindered – you might charitably opt for 'incompetent'. A better phrase would be 'head in the sand'. The failures in these cases, as with the inability of the Westminster system to respond to public demands on migration, rein in the out-of-control spending of the benefits system or perform its most fundamental function of providing security from criminals, all have different underlying causes. But at the core of each is a strange lassitude, a body politic that no longer responds to crises that seem startlingly obvious to voters, remaining instead locked in a spiral of internal obsessions, agonising over the idea that to confront gangs might trigger episodes of racism and continuing with projects that long ago failed any sane cost-benefit analysis. The result is a state that is less 'managed decline' than 'unmanaged collapse', with no obvious pressure valve in sight prior to the next election. One way or another, something will happen to force the British state to pull its head from the sand. The question is whether it happens in time to prevent an explosion. Or not. A week of failures In recent years it became popular to discuss the 'volatility' of the British electorate. People who had previously voted loyally for one party were suddenly up for grabs; votes swung wildly between parties, giving first one, then the other a crushing majority or unexpected defeat at the ballot box. It's true that one way of reading this pattern is to simply say that voters are less loyal to an ideal than they were in the past. Another interpretation, however, would be to view these as attempts by voters to find some way – any way – of shocking Westminster out of its default pathway. If there were any doubt remaining, the failures laid bare over the last week illustrate just how badly a course correction is needed. First, we had Baroness Casey's review into the grooming gangs scandal. This made for tough reading. It laid out how police officers had responded to children pleading for their help: 'sometimes turning a blind eye but often actively enabling abuse', and accused some of being 'incompetent at best' and 'corrupt at worst'. It showed how officials had attempted to dismiss the issue of ethnicity out of hand, uncomfortable with the implications for Britain's multicultural success story, terrified of 'community tensions'. It all but accused the Home Office of fabricating data to maintain there was no particular problem with men from Pakistani backgrounds. Worse still, in doing so it told us very little we didn't already know. We knew that officials were tacitly or actively complicit in what unfolded. We knew that they had effectively deemed it better for society if children were raped and government covered it up, than to risk 'tensions' by intervening. We knew that they had arrested parents who had tried to save their children. News reports and official reviews had laid this story bare for over a decade. Yet even with the failures visible to all, Westminster has proved utterly unwilling to look closely at the extent of offending across Britain, to learn the lessons necessary to fight ongoing abuse, and to deliver justice to those who were wronged. It was more important to protect what was left of the narrative of a diverse nation united than to look honestly at the consequences of previous waves of migration. This is still going on. Casey's review highlighted that 'a significant proportion' of the live police cases she examined involved foreign nationals and asylum seekers. Examining the extent of criminal activity by these groups is hard, given that the Government refuses regularly to publish data on the subject. But data from Freedom of Information requests has shown that a quarter of all sex assaults on women successfully prosecuted in Britain are carried out by foreign nationals, with another 8 per cent by offenders of 'unknown' nationalities. One response to this would be to publish this evidence, alongside data on fiscal contributions and benefits withdrawals, and use it to inform policy on migration. Yet for a political class that sees immigration less as a tool to reshape the country for the better and more as a necessity, the economic and cultural lifeblood of the nation, these are figures to be hidden away. Indeed, for those who see it as an axiomatic good with no need for supporting evidence, there is a moral imperative to crush opposition to it. Virtue comes not in addressing associated problems – the province of populists – but in being blind to them. High speed to nowhere And this scandal is only one manifestation of a deeper disease: Britain appears to be effectively incapable of changing course, locked into assumptions and decisions made decades ago. The unravelling of the High Speed 2 project is another prime example from the last week. The economic case for the project collapsed almost as soon as it was published. A project linking London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, originally set to cost £53 billion in today's money, grew out of all control, with costs spiralling past £120 billion before the sheer scale of the failure triggered the Conservative government's decision to slash the project down to a far less ambitious link between London and Birmingham. Even this, however, is set to cost £67 billion. A project that has been slashed in scope has still somehow risen in price. In the process, the cost-benefit ratio has crumbled. We can attribute some mistakes to naivety at the outset; beliefs about greater efficiencies, or the correct way to allocate risk between the government and contractors. But over the course of the project, even as costs rose, the value of the line somehow kept pace – until suddenly it didn't. The project is now delayed again, with inquiries underway into how the cost of infrastructure has grown so rapidly and the Cabinet Office facing accusations of ignoring concerns over fraud and financial mismanagement. The grooming of children and failed infrastructure projects are about as far away as it is possible to be in policy terms. The manner of the failures, though, is instructive: signals that something is going awry are getting scrambled, incentives for individuals to act are lacking. No-one capable is across the details and willing to speak out about failures. A failed state The list of policy failures in Britain is long. Some symptoms are directly visible in the state's activities. Take the sheer size of NHS waiting lists in a system that translated a 27 per cent cash increase in the budget from 2019 to 2022 into an absolute reduction in the number of people it treated. A 16 per cent rise in the number of full-time equivalent junior doctors alongside an 11 per cent increase in the number of nurses, has led to productivity levels 8 per cent below the 2019 baseline. We could also talk about the spiralling levels of debt, and the fiscal plans that have caused the Office for Budget Responsibility to warn that we are on an unsustainable course, or the benefits system which appears utterly unable to distinguish between the disabled and the workshy. Into this category, also, goes the shoplifting epidemic, the release of prisoners to make room in overcrowded jails, the inability of the state to combat actual crime paired with its obsession with policing speech in case stray thoughts ignite the riots politicians fear are permanently just around the corner. Other signs of failure are in the private sector, in inflation-adjusted wages that are still below their 2008 peak, in housing that remains stubbornly out of reach of those without substantial assistance from the bank of mum and dad. People in Western countries know what failed states look like. They look like Somalia, or South Sudan. The government's grip disintegrates, power fragments and society fragments with it. Basic services collapse and with it the safety of the population. But as the American economist Mancur Olson has pointed out, developed states have a different failure mode. They become too stable, insulated from political upheaval, bound up by interest groups that use their grasp on the institutions to strangle anything which might disrupt their position. Britain's failure mode looks a lot more like the second than the first. We might not be matching the fall of Rome for debauchery, but we are certainly doing our best with a particular form of decadent self-indulgence: from social capital to physical capital, our leaders are eating the seed-corn, running the country down without replacing what they take out. 'There's a bunch of obvious, relatively surface phenomena, like the NHS, or the stupid boats, that are the visible manifestations of things not working,' says Dominic Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson, in an interview with The Telegraph that you can read in full on Sunday. 'But I think what's happening at a deeper level is we are living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out, which is that over a few generations, the institutions and ideas of the elites start to come out of whack with reality. 'The ideas don't match, the institutions can't cope. And what you see repeatedly is this cycle of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling – and then suddenly crisis kicks in and then institutions collapse.' The Blob For a useful short-hand, we can borrow the description of these elites which is often attributed to Cummings: 'the Blob' – an emergent phenomenon with no governing intelligence and no clear leaders, instead resulting from people from the same classes, with the same beliefs and the same incentives, taking the same decisions across public life. Where do the civil servants on the prestigious Fast Stream (a program to accelerate the careers of graduates coming into Whitehall) come from? From families who overwhelmingly had university-educated parents working in 'higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations', arriving in government after education at Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities where the consensus is stifling: one in five academics feel unable to teach controversial views. Given that one in five academics vote for Right-wing parties, and three quarters for the Left, it's not terribly hard to work out which views might count as controversial in this milieu. We might equally ask where Cabinet ministers, senior judges – and, yes, newspaper columnists – come from. The resulting gaps between the political classes and the public can be vast. Shortly after the 2019 election, one study concluded that Conservative MPs were not only more socially liberal than Conservative voters, but of the median for all voters, adopting positions not that far away from Labour's base. The result is that even when signals of voter discontent do cut through the noise surrounding Westminster, they are sometimes simply ignored. In 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019 the party or cause offering reductions in migration won. The electorate's reward for this was Boris Johnson's systematic dismantling of our borders, a quadrupling in net migration over its 2019 level to 906,000 per year. There's nothing wrong with having some merit in your meritocracy, but when people are drawn from the same backgrounds, they will tend to think in the same ways. In the political system, this manifests as a blindness to the idea that the values of politicians can drift from those held by voters, an unwillingness to deliver what the population want; self-centred governance by an establishment class propped up by its hold on the traditional party duopoly and the major institutional organs of British life. One manifestation of this group's beliefs is a form of pathological compassion driven by insulation from its effects: an unwillingness to jail prisoners, turn away illegal migrants or crack down on benefits cheats because to do so would be cruel. The end result of this 'kindness' is often to kill the system that provided for those who were genuinely in need. In toxic combination with these beliefs is a political structure that works actively to evade accountability, with decision-makers rarely facing serious consequences for their failures; so long as they follow process, scrutiny is generally evaded. The crisis of competence Alongside the problem of willingness is the problem of ability. Public fury with politicians is not helped at all by their willingness to make grandiose claims that they fail to live up to. In the words of political strategist James Frayne, 'politicians of all parties have created a toxic climate by assuring voters they can solve practically any problem regardless of size and complexity, while permanently under-delivering'. This has 'fuelled immense public cynicism because voters assume failure derives from incompetence and corruption – always moral corruption, sometimes even financial corruption. This cynicism has become one of the most defining and corrosive aspects of modern electoral politics. Voters increasingly think the worst of politicians and what drives them. They are prone to think they're mostly interested in lining their own pockets or clinging on to power.' 'On HS2, people will be asking whether politicians found themselves under the influence of big businesses, rather than delivering jobs for the North. On the grooming gangs, others will be asking whether politicians sacrificed vulnerable kids to make sure they didn't lose friends and votes. Such feelings absolutely aren't levelled at any party in particular. While Labour will get more short-term anger on grooming gangs, that's only because they were forthright in suggesting calls for proper investigations were politically-motivated. There is a widespread sense that all politicians are the same.' This leaves open a fundamental question: is there a fundamental limit on the British state's ability to deliver things that it seemed able to do just two decades ago? Or, is the disconnect between reality and the signals reaching politicians (through the ideological predisposition of their civil servants) so great that many MPs and ministers are no longer capable of reaching sane evaluations? Reforming the state In Nigel Farage's view, 'everything the British state touches collapses, regardless of colour'. With his party surging in the polls – the beneficiary of two decades of failed red and blue governance – he has every right to pin the blame for these failures on the selection into government of a certain cadre of establishment true believer. 'There are two types of people in politics; those who want to be something, and those who want to do something', Farage says. 'And the be-something's have dominated for decades: Oxbridge kids who want to be PM, cabinet minister, MP – not driven by thoughts about how to make the country better.' The resulting consensus is stifling. 'Everyone wants to be nice. If you're nice, you're liked and socially acceptable. And anyone with a different opinion is unacceptable'. But this doesn't work when the state is failing: 'When Starmer u-turns on rhetoric, don't believe it will lead to reality because it won't. He's saying it to fend off Reform. He has no intention of acting on it.' Competence, too comes in for a blast. 'As a result, we get cabinets full of people lacking in real life experience. They haven't run businesses. They haven't achieved anything. It's mediocrity – we're governed by people who are unqualified to be a middle manager in an Asda in Birmingham'. For Farage, there is only one way left out. 'This country needs political surgery through every single sector of public life. We need a very gentle, British, political revolution. I'm the moderate. If I don't succeed, watch what comes after me.' The canonisation of Saint Luigi The appearance of a new piece of graffiti under a paint-spattered archway in east London would normally draw no more attention than the tagged scrawl it overwrote. In February, however, a new painting briefly drew attention from segments of the world's press. The artwork shows Luigi Mangione, in his green hoodie, framed by the yellow painted bricks of the arch – a halo against a black background. In December 2024, Mangione was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in the street. And almost overnight, he became a cult hero for an extraordinary number of disaffected Americans, who described him as 'Saint Luigi' – a description that images of Mangione bearing a red sacred heart, right hand raised in blessing, make almost literal. Whatever else we might think about Mangione, on this specific and narrow point, it is probably not a good signal of the health of society when its elite class is widely despised. In Britain, this has thankfully achieved expression primarily through political means, although last year's Southport riots were a warning sign about what might come if failures continue. King's College Professor David Betz made headlines with his prediction that Britain could fall into civil war without a change of course. Yet his concerns are shared by some of those on the ground. In the words of one former police officer, in the aftermath of recent public disorder police forces set about working out what to do in response, handling 'resourcing, moving people around the country, calling in the Armed Forces if needed. What they've never really thought about is what they would do if officers decided the risk was too great, and simply didn't come to work. Policing might be able to fill gaps by cancelling days off and extending shifts, but that tempo can't be maintained for long.' More ominously still, 'they've never really considered what would happen in a conflict where officers identified with one side enough to join it. Police officers are vetted, but not with that in mind. And police equipment already goes missing at rather an alarming rate. It's not unlikely that if serious violence started officers might start disappearing to defend their homes and families with their issued weapons – including firearms – if they lose faith in the state's ability to do so.' One more roll for the ballot box Adam Smith's remark that there is 'a great deal of ruin in a nation' was not meant to be an invitation to politicians to attempt to quantify the exact degree. Regrettably, generations of British leaders seem to have acted as if things will probably be fine whether they succeed or fail. The last year of British politics has given every indication of a system under intolerable strain. With the establishment facade beginning to crack, Westminster has a short window in which to change course voluntarily. If that passes, revolution – whether in the form of Prime Minister Nigel Farage, or something more dramatic – could be the result.