Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
Main Page: Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe's debates with the Department for Transport
(14 years ago)
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Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Lord makes an interesting point. One problem that we experience is foreign vehicles coming in with very large fuel tanks, sometimes containing in excess of 1,000 litres of fuel, which enable them to travel all around the UK and then leave without buying any fuel here. There is also an EU directive on the minimum vehicle excise duty rate.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
What does the Minister think of the German satellite tracking scheme? It is more expensive than some of the alternative systems that are available, but does it not provide an investment that could be built on in future and used to track all traffic?
Earl Attlee
The noble Lord makes an important point. We are looking very closely at what our European partners are doing. It is important to remember that their problems are slightly different from ours. European states have a lot of through traffic. We do not have so much through traffic, but we do have lots of foreign vehicles coming to deliver to the UK.