HGV Road User Levy Bill

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr McLoughlin]

Drivers will know that they have to pay the levy before they come into the country. If they fail to pay, the measures available to the enforcement agencies will be used. I make no apology for that. If they think that they will be here for three days, they should pay for three days.

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr McLoughlin]

Very briefly.

[Michael Connarty]

Who will be fined? Will it be the driver or the owner of the vehicle? If it is a hired vehicle, who will suffer the fine?

[Mr McLoughlin]

The driver is responsible for ensuring that the vehicle that he is driving is covered. He is in charge of the vehicle.

The penalty is currently set at £200 and would also be paid in situations where the levy had been underpaid—if someone had declared a lower vehicle weight limit, for example, or the wrong number of axles. Clause 13 inserts the offence in schedule 3 of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, which lists the offences for which fixed penalties can be given.

Where there is frequent non-compliance by a specific vehicle or haulage company, clause 11 will allow for the imposition of a fine up to category 5 on the standard scale—currently £5,000—when someone is convicted of failing to pay the levy. I hope that those measures, coupled with active enforcement, will be seen as a suitable deterrent. Collected fine revenues will be paid into the Consolidated Fund; there was a lot of debate on that when we discussed the Ways and Means resolution.

I am sure the House will agree that by creating fair competition for the UK haulage industry, the Bill will help finally to put right a wrong. I commend the Bill to the House. It is well overdue and should have been introduced some time ago.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I am pleased to make a declaration: I have no interests apart from looking after the interests of my constituents. Hon. Members have said that it is time to level the playing field for road haulage in the UK, but to use more thematically correct imagery, it is time to smooth out the anti-competitive bumps faced by UK haulage companies on the road to European markets.

The Bill will not deal with many anti-competitive burdens placed on the many road haulage companies in my constituency and many others. Grangemouth, which is in my constituency, and which is the only EU-recognised inter-modal transport hub in Scotland, and the many communities along the M9, M8 and M876 triangle with employment in road haulage suffer from damaging high taxation on road fuel. Competitor haulage companies from mainland Europe use that fuel price advantage to collect and deliver in the UK, even in Scotland. The Government must look at that seriously if we are really to level out those bumps.

I know hon. Members want to get on with the debate quickly and that they have discussed the Bill between one another many times, but my constituents probably do not know the Bill’s contents. They know that, currently, operators of UK-registered heavy goods vehicles pay charges or tolls in most European countries—as they tell me every time I meet them—but that foreign-registered HGVs do not pay to use the UK road network. The imbalance is unfair to UK HGV operators.

The Bill will seek to address that by introducing a levy for using UK road networks for all HGV vehicles weighing 12 tonnes and over. The requirement to pay the levy will apply to all categories of public road in the UK and to both UK and foreign-registered HGVs. The levy will range from £85 a year for the smallest HGV to £1,000 for the largest. The idea is to link the charge to the amount of damage caused on the roads by different types of HGVs.

The Bill states that UK-registered HGVs will pay the levy for the same period and in the same transaction that they pay vehicle excise duty, which means that they will pay annually. However, foreign-registered vehicles can pay the levy daily, weekly, monthly or annually, which strikes me as an imbalance, because road haulage companies do not have their vehicles on the road all the time. If paying only when they are on the roads is good enough for foreign vehicles, why should that not be so for UK vehicles?

The Bill states that there will be an associated reduction for UK-registered HGVs in the amount of vehicle excise duty that is payable. That is intended to mean that the vast majority of UK-based hauliers will pay no more than they pay currently. However, if 10 million vehicles use the road and pay the levy, and suddenly 15 million or 20 million start to use the roads, why should the 10 million not pay less than they paid previously? Is this just another way for the Government to make money for the Exchequer, and not a way to advantage current road users?

[Robert Flello]

The intention is that UK hauliers should not pay more, but one of my concerns is that there is no guarantee of that. Some of the numbers I have seen suggest that some UK hauliers will end up paying more. That hardly seems like smoothing out the bumps—quite the reverse.

[Michael Connarty]

I do not know whether my hon. Friend is looking over my shoulder from a distance, but I was about to express that exact concern. The Government have failed to devise a scheme that protects all UK-based hauliers, because EU rules mean that vehicle excise duty cannot be set low enough to compensate all Britain’s HGV users.

I have a number of other concerns, which I am sure will be addressed in Committee. The Bill states that no British road haulier will be worse off as a result of the reform, but I would like to see detailed figures on how much the Government expect to raise from the exercise and on how it will be disbursed. Could some of the money be disbursed to keep vehicle licence duty down for UK heavy goods vehicles? Clearly, the Government need to look at whether they can reduce vehicle excise duty in some way.

Why are UK hauliers set to pay the levy one year before non-UK hauliers?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Stephen Hammond)]

indicated dissent.

[Michael Connarty]

The Minister is indicating that that is not the case. If he is about to tell me that the levy will come in at exactly the same time for everyone, that would be a vast improvement.

[Stephen Hammond]

The Secretary of State confirmed that this afternoon in his opening remarks, and I confirmed that in the Ways and Means debate on 23 October. The only possibility of that not happening would be if there is a minor delay to the procurement of the database, but the reality is that we have moved it so that there will be simultaneous introduction.

[Michael Connarty]

I congratulate the Opposition Front Bench on winning that battle before it has even begun. That was a cause for concern for the Opposition, so I am pleased if that has now been swept away by their good offices and oration. It was an issue only a few days ago.

Will the Minister look again at whether there is a way to enable UK-based drivers to have the same options for payment as non-UK-based drivers? I made this point earlier. Why should it be that those not based in the UK will pay weekly, monthly or daily, but UK owners will pay every day, whether they run a vehicle or not? That seems to be somewhat strange.

Returning to the question of how to police the Bill, I have serious concerns. How does the UK guarantee collection of the fines—a point I made to the Minister? He indicated that it would be the driver who would be responsible. The reality is that the driver will be changed the next time the vehicle is sent into the country. The driver could be changed again, again and again. We are talking about a massive permutation of drivers. I have been attached to the police scheme twice in this place and have spent time with the Serious Organised Crime Agency. One difficulty we have is that people come into the country with the deliberate intention of stealing. They are brought to court, bailed and then disappear—they never come back to the country. Someone else will turn up in that or a similar vehicle to steal once again.

Is the Minister trying to tell us that they will be able to catch the driver, and that the next time the vehicle comes into the country it will not have a different driver? It is all right when there is a family car, and either the Minister or the Minister’s wife could have been driving the car when they were fined, as happened in the case involving a former member of the coalition Government, but it is not the same with a heavy goods vehicle. The owner can change the driver every single day, so why is it not the owner of the vehicle who gets fined? The fine would not be able to be avoided then.

[Robert Flello]

Does that not come back to the point that if the owner of the vehicle lives in another country, then without the cross-border ability to pursue the owner of the vehicle, the money will be collected from nowhere?

[Michael Connarty]

My hon. Friend must have unbelievable eyesight, because I am just about to come on to that very point. It is clear that some Government Members argue that we should extract ourselves from arrangements such as the European arrest warrant. In reality, however, whether it is the vehicle owner or even the driver it may be that we have to extract the person, who is a criminal if they are breaking the law, from another country by using the European arrest warrant. If we withdraw from the European arrest warrant agreement, how will we pursue such people among the 500 million people who live in the EU?

[Andrew Bridgen]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Michael Connarty]

I will certainly give way to the hon. Gentleman who declared his interest earlier.

[Andrew Bridgen]

If the driver is not fined, it should not necessarily be the owner, but the registered operator of the vehicle. The registered operator may or may not be the owner—it is a technicality.

[Michael Connarty]

In the same way that I am pursuing the idea of looking at the supply chain so that human trafficking and modern day slavery can be eradicated by looking at the companies who eventually get the goods, I also think that the owner of the vehicle should discipline and instruct their employees to ensure that they do not break the law. There has to be some way of dealing with this so that we can pursue the vehicles. We have a major problem if we stick with the driver.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Michael Connarty]

I will not take another intervention—people want to get on to other business today. These matters must be discussed in some detail in Committee. If we have a situation where there is no European framework through which we can arrest people—the European arrest warrant—then the Bill will come to naught.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I thank my hon. Friend for being gracious in giving way. I want, through him, to give the Minister the opportunity to answer the question I asked in the Ways and Means debate, the same question the Secretary of State perhaps misunderstood and answered, when I raised it earlier, by referring to European trade rules. I hope that the Minister, in his response to my hon. Friend’s very good point, will be able to clarify what will happen now that we do not have cross-border enforcement, because the Government have opted out of it.

[Michael Connarty]

There will be a lot of things that, if the Government opt out of them, will collapse around our ears. I hope, in making these points, that I am providing positive criticism, because I would like to see the Bill emerge in a perfect form, or as perfect as it can possibly be. I welcome the Bill in principle, and hauliers in my constituency welcome the idea behind it, but we must make sure that it comes out of Committee in a form so that it will do what is intended to do, and is not just a precursor to road pricing for everyone in the UK.