Air Quality (Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles Database) (England and Wales) Regulations 2019

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Thursday 11th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s proposal. I draw the Minister’s attention to the concerns raised by UNICEF, particularly about children’s health. For instance, children’s lungs, which are developing, are particularly susceptible to toxicity in the air. I suffered from pneumonia as a child, and the risks of pneumonia and asthma are raised by high air toxicity levels. These clean air zones seem very welcome.

The Minister talked about nitrogen dioxide levels, but did not mention particulate matter, which can be so fine that it can enter a mother’s respiratory tract and pass through to her developing foetus, reducing birth weight and impacting the foetus in other ways. Issues such as asthma and pneumonia can result from that. Could the Minister say whether she is also looking at particulate matter in these clean air zones?

As a vice-president of the Local Government Association, I am also concerned about further burdens on local government and what the Government are doing to help authorities get the funds necessary to be effective in reacting to this problem.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a member of Sheffield City Council and a vice-president of the Local Government Association, as in the register. I have sat on licensing committees and been the leader of a council, so I understand the process of licensing and the burden that licensing authorities experience. I reiterate the views expressed by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and my noble friend on the Front Bench. Considering that local authorities have lost £6 in every £10 of their spending ability over the last few years, the burden on them is really serious. While no one would disagree that this is a good idea that can help improve the environment, local authorities desperately need resources to enact it. Otherwise, it will be a good idea that turns into a burden and does not have the maximum impact.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her introduction and for organising a helpful briefing with officials before this debate. I declare an interest through my involvement with the charity ClientEarth. It is a breath of fresh air to be debating an SI that is not connected to Brexit. It is a joy on the last day of term. I hope that this is the first sign that normal service is beginning to be restored.

As the Minister said, the SI is, in itself, fairly straightforward, establishing as it does a central database for licensing authorities to record details of taxis and private hire vehicles to enable enforcement of local air quality measures. We have long supported the rollout of clean air zones to tackle air pollution and therefore will not object to this SI. However, sadly, the Government have been consistently slow in addressing the growing public health crisis, which has arisen from illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide. This proposal once again seems to be a partial solution to a huge national problem. Time and again, ClientEarth has successfully won cases in the courts arising from the Government’s failure to tackle the air pollution crisis effectively. The jury is still out on whether their latest version of the clean air strategy is bold enough.

The central problem with the Government’s strategy, which we are dealing with and has been raised by a number of noble Lords in the debate, is that it places the onus on delivering clean air on cash-strapped local authorities and does not provide sufficient leadership and resources from the centre to make it happen. The result is that local authorities have been repeatedly missing deadlines for bringing air pollution into safe limits. The Government have known for some time that the quickest way to address the problem is to introduce clean air zones linked to charging for polluting vehicles, but they have been reluctant to require authorities to take these measures. As a result, some have and some have not. It is still unclear what will happen to the authorities that do not clean up their air quality in a timely manner.

Turning to our specific proposals, first, it would have been easier for the Government to establish a national database at the outset into which local authorities could feed data, rather than waiting for local databases to be set up and then trying to co-ordinate the different IT systems. Could the Minister clarify whether this was considered, and why this proposal is only now, belatedly, in this form before us? Also, the regulations designate only that the Secretary of State “may create a database” for the information received. Can the Minister explain why it does not require the Secretary of State to produce a database, given that this seems to be the whole purpose of this SI?

Secondly, as the Minister explained, the original SI was withdrawn and reissued. It was considered by our colleagues in the Commons on 26 February, and we are dealing with it here today, 11 April. The SI has an operative date of 1 May, so can the Minister assure us that this gives licensing authorities enough time to prepare for this new requirement? If, as I think it does, it covers London, which already has clean air zones, can the Minister assure us that arrangements with the Mayor of London to feed into that database will be in place by 1 May, and, if not, what provisions are being made for that?

Thirdly, I was interested in the debate on the SI in the Commons. The Minister there was asked how the databases would differentiate between a vehicle when it was being used for work and when it was being driven for personal use. She replied that this was an issue for local authorities to decide—in other words, she passed the buck back to the local authorities. I found that answer rather unsatisfactory. There is a real gap in the way that the system is being set up by devolving the responsibilities to local authorities. The least the Government could do to resolve this is to issue some sort of guidance at a national level, so that the matter is dealt with consistently across different local authorities and licensing authorities. Can the Minister explain how local and national databases will be able to differentiate between private and public use to enable proper charging to take place?

Finally, the SI creates another government database, with details of the approximately 300,000 taxi and private hire vehicles in England and Wales. This raises a question about the security of the data and the uses to which it might be put. Am I right that the data will not include details of the driver, but just the vehicle that has been licensed? Could the Minister provide reassurance that the data will not be used for other purposes, such as being cross-referenced with immigration or taxation databases? Could she envisage any other purposes for which this database might be used, even in extreme circumstances?

As I said at the outset, this SI provides only a partial solution to the challenge of cleaning up our air quality. It lacks the urgent national action that we feel is necessary to really make a difference. We need tighter, legally binding limits on pollution levels at a national level, with penalties for those who transgress. The forthcoming environment Bill provides an opportunity to make this a reality. Therefore, I hope the Minister can reassure us that the Government will use it to make the huge changes that will clean up our air for good. I look forward to her response.

--- Later in debate ---

I am sorry to disappoint the noble Baroness on the issue of whether a taxi is working or being used by a family to go on a trip. We are going to leave it up to local authorities to decide how they deal with this, because they will have a better understanding of what their local fleets of taxis and private hire vehicles look like and what the most appropriate outcome would be. It might be that in some areas lots of people do one day a week and in others they do seven. The local authorities will obviously liaise with their local fleets of taxis and PHVs and will be able to set—

[Lord Scriven]

I have sat on a licensing committee. We do not have that kind of detail at local authority level. The only way to determine that would be whether the person had a fare in the cab or vehicle at a certain time. Local authorities will not, therefore, be able to make a determination based on the information which the Minister has just referred to. We are going to have to have some national guidance which helps all local authorities make that decision. Otherwise, we are going to get decisions, which are not consistent across the country, that will feed into the database—whether or not the vehicle is being used as a private family vehicle. The information being sought is not collated by local authorities at the moment.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. I was not saying that the local authority would have the information, but one would certainly expect it—particularly if it was a larger one—to be in contact with its local fleets of taxis and PHVs to understand the more general working practices. Each of these charging clean air zones will have been set up after local consultation. I expect that is one of the issues which the local fleets would have put into the consultation. We are not minded to provide national guidance at the moment, although obviously that may change in the future. For the time being, we believe that this should be a local decision and that it should be up to the local licensing authorities to come up with a reasonable solution for what works in their areas.

Security of data is obviously an important issue. Because of the powers in the Environment Act 1975, under which this is set up, the data can only be shared for the purpose of enforcing air quality measures. The Act limits the information that can be provided to the minimum necessary to identify the vehicle as a taxi or PHV and does not cover any personal data about the licence holder.

I believe I have covered pretty much everything.