Haigh Is Set to Cut the 2030 Electric Car Target From 80% to 60%

Louise Haigh is expected to cut the share of new cars that must be electric by 2030 from 80 per cent to about 60 per cent. She will try to lock that number at a meeting in Downing Street on Wednesday, government sources have told the Guardian and the BBC, after months of argument between the transport, energy and business departments. Haigh, First Secretary of State and the minister who chairs the talks, is also expected to keep the flexibilities that let carmakers miss a yearly target until 2034, and to tell colleagues not to come back later and ask for another cut. A government spokesperson said no decision had been taken.

The Commons is in a short November recess, so the row will not be tested on the floor today. Zack Polanski, the Green leader, used the morning to call Labour's climate record shocking. The same morning, COP31 opens in Antalya, with energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh leading the British delegation and arguing that the crisis is already here, in Britain, now. The mandate fight and the summit speech are the same argument in two rooms.

What the industry says it cannot hit

The zero-emission vehicle mandate, introduced under Rishi Sunak, raises the share of new cars that must be electric each year. The target is 33 per cent in 2026, then 38 per cent in 2027, on the way to 80 per cent in 2030. New cars that run only on petrol or diesel are still due to be phased out in 2030. By 2035, ministers say, every new car and van sold should be zero emission. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders forecasts that electric cars will be 27.2 per cent of sales this year, not 33. It puts next year at 32 per cent against a 38 per cent target, and says that by 2028 the industry will be 14.5 points short of a 52 per cent target. Flexibilities already let firms lean on hybrid sales or defer a miss. Carmakers have asked for what they call urgent relief.

Whitehall looked at options from leaving the targets alone and stretching the flexibilities, to cutting the 2030 mix as low as 50 per cent. The landing the sources describe, 60 per cent with flexibilities kept to 2034, is a cut of about a quarter in the flagship number. It is also the government's largest single decarbonisation policy. Labour MPs who disliked earlier softening of the green programme will treat Wednesday as a test of whether the commitment is the 2030 date on a press release or the 80 per cent in the mandate. The spokesperson's line this morning is that the government is united behind the mandate, behind the 2030 phase-out of petrol and diesel-only cars, behind a fully zero-emission new fleet in 2035, and behind the legal net-zero target.

Forty million pounds, and a ward round

The Prime Minister's public diary is not the car industry. Andy Burnham is visiting a hospital this morning to set out a 40 million pound fund for GPs in England. Up to 300,000 patients with heart disease, frailty or chronic lung disease are meant to get extra checks, home assessments and medicine reviews this winter, so a small problem does not become a night in A&E. Primary care networks can claim 126 pounds for each eligible patient. Burnham said the NHS would take pressure off hospitals only if people were kept well at home, and that he would not pretend the winter would be easy. Health secretary Yvette Cooper called it a practical plan for the frailest patients, after a summer the service spent on heat.

The two announcements sit on the same Monday because the government wants a winter story that is about care, while the climate story is still a leak. Fahnbulleh has already told the House that new North Sea gas will not cut bills this winter. Households are still carrying billions in energy debt. A weaker electric-car target does not lower a unit rate in January. It does tell Antalya, and Labour MPs, how hard London is willing to pull on the one lever it fully controls. Wednesday is the meeting. Today is the argument about what that meeting is allowed to give away.