Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 4) Regulations 2021

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2021 Grand Committee

There is a further saving on examiner effort that might be available. At one point, I was driving a tank transporter carrying a tank grossing 100 tonnes. However, I could not drive the tank in public because, at the time, I did not have an H licence, which covers track-laying vehicles steered by their tracks. This does not make sense. I will not weary the Committee with further technical details, but will the Minister agree to meet me and officials to discuss this matter? I do not think that the H licence test is required at all.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her explanation. I have some sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, because, as the Minister knows, I waited five months for my licence.

Listening to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, it is important to bear in mind that he has considerable experience. To me, experience is at the centre of all this. I note, and bear in mind in my comments, that one of the things he said was that passing the test does not make someone an HGV driver because this takes a lot longer.

Taken together, these SIs set out to simplify driving tests. They are part of the litany of what I understood to be 25 crisis actions—I gather it is now 30—that the Government are taking to try to tackle the shortage of HGV drivers. The logic is that, if you streamline driving tests, this will free up slots for tests, enabling more people to qualify. They will make the process of training to qualification quicker and easier, so the staged process is being abandoned.

I will make some general comments then ask some specific questions. Here, I bear in mind what the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, said. How has this crisis been allowed to get so bad? In a previous debate, the Minister told us that there had been a shortage since 2010, so it has hardly happened suddenly. The Government say that the crisis is of long standing and worldwide, but we are the worst in Europe. In percentage terms, only Poland has a greater percentage shortage of drivers, and that is a totally artificial situation because it services the rest of Europe—a very high percentage of Polish lorry drivers drive almost entirely, if not entirely, abroad—so we have the most acute shortage. The No. 2 order blames Covid, although the No. 4 order has the grace to admit that Brexit might be a factor and quotes shortage figures of between 39,000 and 100,000 drivers. To put that in context, the total requirement is estimated to be around 300,000.

Clearly the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has driven trailers on many occasions, but I ask how many people in this Room—there is no need for noble Lords to put up their hands—have driven trailers? I reckon backing a trailer to be the trickiest driving manoeuvre that I have ever undertaken. It takes experience, judgment and the kind of steady nerve that only comes with practice. I wonder whether anyone has seen a trailer jack-knife? I have, on the M5. It blocked the road in both directions for two hours and led to some serious injuries. The cause, although one can observe only from the outside, was that it was a windy day and the driver was going very fast. That was probably the cause, and it was probably due to a lack of experience. Frankly, I am astonished that, having got themselves into this mess, and despite warnings from the haulage industry, the Government’s reaction is to simplify tests in a way that could have an impact on road safety. The Government admit that themselves. The Explanatory Memorandum to the No. 4 order says:

“Any impact on road safety ... may therefore be marginal”.


That is a hopeful statement, but it implies that there will be an impact.

However, although the consultation was held over the summer period and was relatively short—four weeks—it led to 9,541 responses, some of which, we are told, led to serious concerns about road safety. There has been no response by the Government to the public consultation yet; when can we expect that? The Explanatory Memorandum says that, of those who responded,

“the majority of people supported this proposal”.

I would be interested to know the percentage of people and organisations that supported the proposal because haulage organisations have expressed serious concerns. On 4 November, the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, of which I am a deputy chair, took note of the concerns of its road user behaviour group that the changes to the testing system and the relaxation of drivers’ hours, to which the noble Earl has referred, are a threat to safety. So why did the Department for Transport rush to announce these changes to driver training and testing two days before the end of the consultation period?

The Government have said that they will review this, which I am very pleased to hear, but the review period is very long—an awful lot of driving is going on in a period of three years. I believe that we can see a pattern very much sooner than that. Is the Minister in a position to give us a commitment that the Government, informally at the very least, will keep this under continuous review and take swift action if there are problems with safety?

There is a clear interaction between the availability of HGV drivers and that of bus drivers. Bus companies are already complaining about a shortage of drivers, who are being attracted into lorry driving because the pay has gone up recently. I am afraid to say to noble Lords that bus drivers’ wages are one of my hobby horses; I think they are seriously underpaid for the level of responsibility they take on. A shortage of bus drivers is having an impact on bus services, but I am concerned about any impact on the levels of experience and expertise that we can expect in future from newly qualified bus drivers. We are talking here about the safety of passengers as well as that of other road users.

One way in which the Government are trying to simplify the system is by reducing the required levels of expertise and qualification for those who can supervise a learner driver. This is a very risky path. Some years ago, a previous Government recognised the need for a certain level of experience before you could supervise. Decades of evidence indicate that you are much more likely to have an accident in the early years of your driving career. That underlines my point that experience counts.

One of the actions proposed to be taken is that backing the trailer should not be part of the main test but should be assessed by training organisations. Can the Minister explain in detail how this will work? I noted that she said that the Government “recommend” that people undertake this training rather than it being compulsory. I thought that it was going to be compulsory, but that it would happen not as part of the test but as part of training with a training organisation. If my original understanding is correct, can the Minister explain how the organisations will be chosen and accredited and how we can be sure that individual drivers have passed that aspect of the training?

One is endlessly concerned these days about the ability of organisations to fulfil the contracts they are awarded. A major question is whether these new tests and licences will be fully recognised in Northern Ireland and hence in the Republic of Ireland. Paragraph 7.6 of the Explanatory Memorandum for the No. 2 regulations refers to the fact that people may wish to take the B + E test for employment purposes. Is the implication therefore that some companies will still demand full qualification? It also refers to people wanting to take both tests in order to drive outside Great Britain.

Are the Government saying that the provision will not be recognised in the EU? The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, raised that, I believe. That will not just have implications for commercial HGV drivers; it will also have implications for people towing horseboxes, and dozens of other examples. When we left the EU, we were promised that there would be no watering down of standards, but here we are in a situation where that is effectively what is happening. Last night, in the police Bill, we concentrated on road safety, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, know. The message of that was that we should be dedicated to raising standards, yet that is not the message that we are getting with these two SIs.