Cost of living crisis? MSPs charge cars for free at Holyrood
... but good luck f inding a working charger for yours!
MSPs are dodging soaring fuel bills by charging their electric cars for free at the Scottish parliament.
The Scottish Mail on Sunday can reveal 15 charging points have been set up in the Holyrood car park, allowing politicians to top up their cars at taxpayers’ expense.
Thanks to the soaring cost of energy, the average bill to recharge a car has risen to about £32, meaning MSPs – who already enjoy a basic salary of £66,000 a year, generous pension, free creche and subsidised canteen – can benefit from yet another valuable perk paid by the public purse.
Meanwhile, thousands of drivers who wish to charge their electric vehicles, but are not allowed into the Holyrood car park, must use an unreliable network of publicly available charging points where, according to the latest research, up to a quarter are broken at any given time.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance condemned the state-sponsored freebie and insisted public representatives should pay their way like everyone else.
Digital campaign manager Joe Ventre said: ‘At a time of economic turmoil, it’s unreasonable to expect hard-pressed households to pick up the tab for politicians’ electric car costs. The Scottish parliament must ensure that it is cutting costs by cracking down on these sorts of perks.’
Similar arrangements at Westminster have angered some MPs, who believe colleagues should put their hand in their pocket at a time when a 12p-a-litre fuel duty increase is being mooted in the Budget next March. One MP said: ‘There’s no free petrol or diesel pump, so why they can charge electric cars for free?’
The life of an MSP is already heavily subsidised by taxpayers.
Their pay rose 3.4 per cent this year to £66,642 and the catering subsidy to the MSPs’ dining room was £230,119 in just the second quarter of 2020-21 – up almost £75,000 on the year before.
The availability of charging points has been subject to debate after a BBC Disclosure programme this month found almost a quarter of Scotland’s public charging points were faulty.
The defects were found in the Chargeplace Scotland scheme, run by the Scottish Government, with 23.4 per cent of the network presenting issues ranging from broken screens and plugs to being offline altogether. Laura
Young, an environmentalist who has fronted Scottish Government campaigns on sustainability, has been driving an electric car for three years and said it had become more difficult to find public charging points that were working and available.
She said: ‘There’s less available because there’s more electric cars putting pressure on them.’
Quango Transport Scotland insisted just 2 per cent of the network was faulty.
However, data from LeaseLoco in August showed Scotland had the slowest growth in vehicle charging points in Britain in a year. The RAC estimates it can cost up to £32 to fully charge a typical family electric car at charging points in Scotland.
It said the average cost per mile for someone limited to rapid and ultra-rapid public chargers, which are typically used at motorway services, had risen to 18p, compared with a cost per mile equivalent of 19p for petrol cars and 21p for diesel.
Last night, the Scottish parliament refused to address criticism of the electric freebie for MSPs. A spokesman said: ‘Electric car charging points are one of a number of measures we have taken to reduce our carbon footprint.’