Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 5) Regulations 2021

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Grand Committee

I look forward to hearing what other noble Lords have to say about these regulations. Of course, they have my support.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, things are in a terrible mess on all fronts, are they not? The Department for Transport is an example of where problems seem to have got a bit out of hand. I thank the Minister for her explanation, but I find it no more satisfactory than the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee did. That committee is not known for its extreme language, but its report is excoriating on these regulations. It refers, in a letter to the Leader of the House, to them being a particularly egregious example of departments failing to provide the required explanatory material in the required timescale. The Government’s defence, which the Minister has set out clearly today, is that this is an emergency measure. But, to be honest, that is surely stretching our credulity.

After years of warnings from the logistics industry, the Government have been panicked into taking steps to deal with the driver shortage. The Minister herself made it clear, on a previous occasion, that the shortage of drivers went back 10 years. She has told us on several occasions, and repeated it today, that the Government have taken 32 separate measures to tackle the problem. She also said recently that most of them were small, incremental steps that added up to an effective package. So if this measure were delayed because the required evidence of the road safety impact is not yet available, it would have only a marginal impact on the Government’s overall response. There is, therefore, no reason to cut corners.

This is, after all, a very indirect measure: it reduces standards and requirements for the drivers of non-HGV vehicles in order to free up spaces for the drivers of HGV vehicles. It was unacceptable, when these regulations originally came to the House, that the road safety impact had been ignored. It is doubly so now that they have had to be returned to us, because the Government have now had time to note the concerns expressed and do the necessary analysis. In previous debates on these regulations I have raised my concerns on safety, but what is more important is that I am reflecting the concerns of experts.

The B+E testing requirements were introduced in 1997, as a result of real safety concerns, on the basis of evidence. I am aware that the Minister is far too young to remember it, but there was a debate on the issue of road safety. Since then, our roads have become much busier; hence accidents will be more, not less, likely. The regime for B+E testing and training is being abandoned, with no meaningful replacement. The plan is to review it within three years, but that is far too long for something that is going ahead with no evidence at this stage. I urge the Minister that, at the very minimum, there should be a review after one year.

In the view of those in the haulage industry, it is simply wrong that someone can tow a trailer or caravan weighing up to 3,500 kilograms with no testing or training—and do so the day after they pass their driving test for a small car or van. Like the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, I have just come from a meeting with Network Rail about bridge strikes. It is asking for more testing and training, not less; that is what it says its evidence requires.

The Government have abandoned the wealth of evidence, year after year, showing that new and novice drivers are far more likely to have accidents because of their inexperience. The insurance industry knows this, which is why new drivers are charged much higher premiums. The logistics organisations strongly oppose this change and regard it as irresponsible. Unlike the C+E change, it will be virtually impossible to reverse because new licences will be issued with the B+E qualification on them.

As noble Lords can imagine, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Trailer and Towing Safety shares those concerns. Specifically, its concerns include, first, the lack of an impact assessment on road safety and, secondly, the statistics that it knows of. In the B+E test for car and trailer driving, pass rates suggest that there is consistently a fail rate of 30%, with 8,575 people failing the test in 2019-20. Under the proposed legislation, these drivers would be deemed qualified and able to tow a trailer immediately because they will not need to have taken a test. To the APPG’s mind, these proposals undermine the Government’s previous commitment to trailer safety and the campaign #towsafe4freddie, which it values. It shares the concern of the towing industry that this measure will have an impact on both safety standards and livelihoods because it will mean that a much broader range of people will be qualified for this sort of commercial work, which will undermine the qualifications and skills of those who have been through the test.

Even at this late stage, I urge the Minister to pause and think again. At the very least, I ask her to defer this until the department has done its own impact assessment and then reconsider in the light of that impact assessment. Better still, I urge her to abandon it because, by all logic, this cannot be good for road safety. It is really not worth the risks it creates. This is not about the usual topics of impact assessments. When we have impact assessments, we have fine calculations about how many pounds something will cost small businesses and so on; this impact assessment will be assessed in terms of lives.

We have a fundamental change creeping in, with inadequate evidence, under the guise of urgency. It is not really an urgent measure, because it will be permanent. We need legislation based on evidence. We have had enough of policy-making on the hoof; we need evidence-based policy-making. I urge the Government to give themselves a chance to get that evidence, to reconsider the matter, and to bring this back only if they genuinely feel that this will be safe.

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The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, made some excellent points. I would love to spend another 10 minutes going through them but I think that I probably should not. I will therefore write a letter to him about bridge-bashing, the DVLA and all sorts of other things.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

I thank the Minister for her detailed response but there are huge inconsistencies in it. I draw to her attention the fact that the Government appear to have a limited approach to relevant data. She talks about the difficulties in obtaining data, but we have firm data on both the number of people who fail this test every year and the number of new drivers who have accidents in the first year or two of their driving careers. There are other approaches that the Government could have taken, such as doing away with the test and saying that you must have two years’ driving experience before you can tow a trailer as large as this. Did the Government consider other approaches? They seem to have gone for the extreme, riskiest option rather than looking at other things, such as increasing the capacity of driving test centres.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

This Government are increasing the capacity of driving test centres; it is one of the 32 interventions that we have already outlined. We could have put in a two-year requirement but that would not have achieved what we wanted because there is no reason why you would deny somebody who is a perfectly good driver, even though they have just passed their driving test, the chance to do the training and tow a heavy trailer. I am not sure that there would have been a good rationale for denying somebody that right when, quite frankly, old people like me can already drive a heavy trailer—and I have never been anywhere near any training. There are already inconsistencies in the system, so these regulations create a simple system that everybody can understand, with mitigations in place to ensure that it is as safe as possible.