Christopher Scholefield, Partner at Viberts in Jersey, looks at some of the legal implications of what may be the biggest shake-up of transport in the Channel Islands for decades. Illustration by Thinus Slabber
Head north to England, buy an electric car, and the government will give you a £4,500 subsidy. Do the same thing in France and the subsidy is €6,000. In Jersey, the best deal on offer has only ever been a subsidy of £300 towards the cost of an e-cycle, while in Guernsey a similar scheme remains under investigation.
Perhaps that explains why the number of electric vehicles (EVs) on Channel Island roads remains exceptionally small – roughly 200 in a fleet of 125,000 registered vehicles in Jersey and 144 in a fleet of 83,000 registered vehicles in Guernsey. This is surprising given that, for local motorists, ‘range anxiety’ has never been an issue.
It’s too soon to say what fate awaits internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Surely they will eventually be banned from built-up areas, commuter routes and near schools.
So the off-road capabilities of the glossy crossover SUV in the dealer’s showroom may soon seem less important than the fact they’re banned on environmental grounds from going where you need to go, when you need to go there.
No legal issues arise here: you’re free to buy that car or not. The dealer makes no promises in the contract of sale about what the future may hold for it. Even those enticing you to trade in a dirty old diesel for a clean new one make no contractually binding promises about how long any vehicle with an exhaust pipe will be welcome on our roads.
There are, however, wider legal implications arising from the coming changeover that go well beyond changes to the climate of opinion. Getting power for your car will no longer involve a visit to one of our islands’ existing filling stations. You’ll expect to charge up whenever and wherever there’s power. Here are just a few of the legal issues flowing from that.
Planning and taxation
For residential areas with predominantly on-street parking, will the future see charging points installed along the whole street? That might be a design challenge in historic and other sensitive areas, such as sea-front car parks.
Work is already being done in some communities to investigate adding charging stations to existing lamp standards. Leisure attractions will want to seek permission to install the required charging infrastructure as a means to cater for their visitors.
As petrol sales fall, change-of-use applications from garage forecourts to residential are bound to follow. Indeed, the smart money may already be on properties currently blighted by an adjacent filling station, which will eventually be making way for residential redevelopment.
Areas currently bothered by noisy and smelly traffic will start to look more appealing to developers when the only disturbance suffered from passing vehicles becomes the swoosh of rubber on tarmac.
With regard to taxation, the States of Jersey made £21.8 million in 2016, and the States of Guernsey made £19.4 million in 2017 out of vehicle fuel duty. EVs will dry up that income stream, which will have to be replaced. Taxing electricity used to power up an EV, as opposed to, say, running the fridge, doesn’t look practical.
Jersey hits gas guzzlers on registration with a vehicle emissions duty exceeding £1,900, whereas Guernsey charges just £42. But paradoxically it’s Guernsey that has a healthy population of highly efficient, second-hand, Japanese domestic market micro cars because it doesn’t insist that all Guernsey-registered vehicles have EU-type approval.
Given the loss of income EVs will cause, we must expect a return to an updated annual road tax windscreen disc, charged not according to emissions but on the grounds of congestion, which even EVs cause. If the States actually wants to address sedentary lifestyles and congestion rather than simply replacing lost revenue, then it’ll have to consider road pricing, which GPS technology has made much more easy to operate.
Home buying and employment
Homes with off-street parking, allowing easy domestic charging, will command a premium. If you run a cable from your front door across the pavement to your car, how long before someone falls over it and sues?
For new blocks of flats, the declarations of co-ownership or articles of association will need amending to provide a regime for the installation, access to and consumption charges of on-site charging facilities. Some buyers will be put off flats where this hasn’t been sorted out.
Luxury flats may offer one charging station per unit, but further downmarket a rota could be needed. Existing co-owners, keen to protect the marketability of their properties, would be well advised to set up a sinking fund to pay for the required facilities and to agree rules for their use. The EU is working on regulations to oblige new residential units to have access to a charging point, so the writing on the wall will soon be joined by a charging station.
The islands employ hundreds of trained mechanics who maintain ICE vehicles. Since EVs have so few moving parts, this sort of work will either change beyond recognition or simply vanish.
Employers will need to update and then scrupulously apply their redundancy policies. Those keen to retain the best staff will want to offer contracts providing generous in-work retraining opportunities.
Astute motor franchisees already know which manufacturers are no longer at the forefront of technological change and will seek new suppliers. Anyone remember Rover or Saab these days?
Commercial leaseholds and retail
In recent years, there has been a coming together of petrol stations and food retail. For some reason, the public hasn’t been put off buying food stored and offered for sale right next to the fumes and exhaust gases of a busy forecourt. As demand for petrol reduces, so this model will need to be reappraised.
Convenient locations offering abundant parking will survive. Those also offering a quick charge for their shoppers’ EVs will be better placed, but both will have lost their USP – access to the pumps.
Will some run schemes allowing only loyal customers to have a free power top-up, or will free power for all become the norm, just like free parking? Commercial landlords owning properties of this sort will need to reconfigure them, and their power infrastructure, if they want their tenants to stay put and continue trading successfully.
The smartphone revolution was swift and all-embracing. Because they’re a replacement technology not a new one, EVs will take longer, but as Nicola Sturgeon said when announcing Scotland’s 2032 changeover: “To succeed, Scotland must lead change, not simply trail in its wake.”
There’s a lesson there for the States in both islands. Are we using our autonomy constructively or has the blame culture reduced our governments to lamely observing innovations elsewhere and then copying them?
It was the Isle of Man that rushed to rewrite its traffic laws to be a test bed for autonomous vehicles, not Jersey or Guernsey – so guess which Crown Dependency is now the talk of the Washington Post and has chums in the Googleplex. Inevitably, however, whatever our States do or don’t do, private citizens will think through what’s coming and lay their plans accordingly.
• The author acknowledges the kind help of Colin Le Page of the States of Guernsey’s Traffic and Highway Services Department in supplying many of the Guernsey statistics used in this article, but the opinions expressed above are the responsibility of the author alone.