Haulage Permits and Trailer Registration Bill [HL]

Lord Teverson Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 27th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I had the great privilege and enjoyment of working in the road freight industry for the first 17 years of my career. It was rather different from my parliamentary career but it was just as competitive—in fact, it was more competitive. As the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said, this is probably the most competitive sector in the economy, with a large number of SME companies operating in it. Any costs, charges, delays or extra bureaucracy—red tape as we normally call it—will have a very negative impact on the sector. This is an unintended consequence of the Brexit negotiations, particularly the red lines on the customs union and single market that the Government have chosen. I shall come back to that theme later. This is an unnecessary and—in the sense that it was not in the Queen’s Speech—unexpected Bill, which promises the industry quite a substantial amount of extra red tape.

Looking at the size of the issue, there are some 4 million cross-border truck movements in and out of the United Kingdom per annum. This is an addition to the customs issue, which the Minister herself mentioned. There will be extra costs there, too: an average of £500 a day for the delay of a truck going across a border. The number of customs declarations will have to go up from 55 million to something like a quarter of a billion. In Dover, there are 10,000 freight movements a day, with no holding space for delay. There are issues around rules of origin and phytosanitary conditions. Hauliers and road transport operators will have to deal with all those issues post Brexit, based on the red lines the Government have put down. So this is an important Bill, but it is part of a larger problem and challenge to the industry to adjust over a relatively short period to the new, post-Brexit situation. This will be challenging financially, time-wise, bureaucratically —in every way—to an industry that is always under pressure.

The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, has given an excellent summary of the majority of the issues, so I will ask the Minister a number of questions. I, too, would like to understand the cost to hauliers of these permits. In her introductory remarks, the Minister said that it would be comparable to the cost of permits in countries that we deal with elsewhere in the world. Presumably we have a fairly good idea of what those are; the analysis will be there. I would be interested to hear about that. Are we certain, as negotiations stand, that we can keep the community licences we have at the moment during the transition period? Having seen the correspondence on the offer from Brussels on the transition deal and the Government’s response, I do not see this as an issue. I hope we will have a breathing space of two years, 18 months or whatever it is. It is important for the industry to understand how much of a breathing space it might have, provided we do not come to no deal in the meantime.

On trailer registration, there is an absolutely huge number of trailers. I am slightly reassured by the Minister that it will relate only to trailers used on international movements. However, hauliers may often not be aware which trailers they might or might not want to use and feel they have to register their whole fleets. Does the Minister have an estimate of the number of trailers and semi-trailers in the United Kingdom that will have to be registered?

What is happening about foreign vehicles coming into this country? This is the other side of the argument. What are we expecting as a permit system from them? Are we going to give them free access? Are we going to allow them to undertake cabotage in the UK, as we will almost certainly be stopped from doing in other European Union countries? Will we charge them road fund licence fees for operating on British roads? As I understand it, foreign or cross-border traffic by road transport is heavily dominated by EU 27 rather than British vehicles. Are we to have issues around paying for our roads and infrastructure?

Does the Bill require new IT systems in the Department for Transport and, if so, have they started to be developed? Are they complex? Are they being put out to consultants? I hope not. Can we be certain that this will happen? As we all know, IT systems are one area of development where we need urgent and rather forced change when things go wrong and we do not meet deadlines. I am unclear whether these regulations apply to or will be needed by other EU countries for own-account operations, as well as hire and reward. Most of the commentary in this area is around hire and reward, but what about the own-account organisations?

I am very pessimistic about this. If the Government stick to their red line of being outside not just the customs union but the single market, I can guarantee that this legislation and scheme will be necessary. There is not a chance that, outside the single market, we will be able to have a similar system to community licensing. That is described by Mr Barnier as cherry picking. A number of colleagues, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and I met him last week, and he once again made the point that Britain would not be able to cherry pick if it is not in the single market. This is one of those areas, so I very much regret its bureaucracy and cost, and that this unnecessary act will indeed be necessary if we have a Brexit that is outside the single market.