Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
DEPARTMENT FOR
TRANSPORT & DVLA
17 OCTOBER 2007
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome
to the Committee of Public Accounts. Today we are considering
the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on Vehicle and
Excise Duty 2006-07 Accounts. We welcome back Clive Bennett,
who is the Chief Executive of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing
Agency, and Stephen Hickey, an Additional Accounting Officer at
the Department for Transport. Mr Bennett, this is your last appearance
I think.
Mr Bennett: I think so, yes.
Q2 Chairman: How grateful you will
be! You are retiring, are you?
Mr Bennett: That is right.
Q3 Chairman: I am sorry this is your
last appearance because this is really a very poor report. We
have a situation where evasion has now increased from 3.6% to
5%. That is an estimated loss of revenue of £217 million.
Many vehicle owners are flagrantly violating the law. For motorcyclists
it is a staggering 37%. I have got to ask you, Mr Bennett, what
has gone wrong?
Mr Bennett: Of course, we are
hugely disappointed with the report, and I think I mentioned this
in the Annual Report, because every internal indicator we had
was showing that evasion was improving. That is largely because,
as a result of looking at the results we have got, we found that
the people who are registered are in fact reducing considerably
but it is the external people who are not registering who are
very difficult to get hold of and the only tool we have is wheel
clamping. The big lesson here is we have succeeded on what I call
the soft evader, the people who are registered, and we have got
a problem with the hard evader.
Q4 Chairman: I wanted to ask you
about this. Why is it so difficult to deal with the hard evader?
Let us just look at motorcyclists where we obviously have a catastrophic
situation here where a very large proportion of the biking community
has decided they are not going to pay their licence. Why can you
not have more spot checks, for instance, so that it gets round
in the community that there is a chance of being stopped, have
a lorry parked there next to the spot check, your motorcycle is
going to be impounded immediately and you will not get your motorcycle
back until you pay your licence and there will be an on-the-spot
fine and all the rest of it? Why do you not do more of this sort
of thing to really drive home to people that this is not acceptable
behaviour?
Mr Bennett: The difficulty at
the moment from our point of view is the amount of powers we have
on motorcycles is relatively limited. We have not got powers to
stop, for example. We can spot them on ANPR (Automatic Number
Plate Recognition).
Q5 Chairman: Well, the police have
powers to stop.
Mr Bennett: The police do.
Q6 Chairman: People commit crimes
because they think they are not going to get caught and obviously
a large proportion now think they are not going to get caught.
Why do you not work with the police to get more spot checks?
Mr Bennett: As I say, we do work
with the police to a degree but there is only so much we can do.
We do most of our enforcement on motorcycles from the record through
Continuous Registration. We now can use ANPR. We used to have
a problem with ANPR in that it could not read number plates and
the police cannot read number plates from the rear. We can read
from front and rear. That is one of the limitations because it
is physically difficult to pick up that they are untaxed unless
you can catch them on the road driving.
Q7 Chairman: That is why I am suggesting
to you that there should be more catching them on the road driving.
Is that something you are prepared to look at?
Mr Bennett: It is certainly something
we are looking at. Certainly one of the things we are looking
at with the whole of the hardened evasion category, including
motorcycles, is working much tighter with the police through the
Home Office and that is one of the things the Department is looking
at with us.
Q8 Chairman: It is obvious why more
people do not want to pay a licence at all. It is because there
are more and more speed cameras, more and more cameras in petrol
stations seeing if you drive off and there is the Congestion Charge
in London. It is an appalling situation for law-abiding people
when they know that an increasing number of people are just cocking
a snook at the law, literally giving two fingers to the law, so
all these law abiding people have to pay their licence, pay the
Congestion Charge, pay for their petrol, all the other things.
It is not just spot checks, let us think of something else. Why
do you not work more closely with traffic wardens? In big cities
there is a plague of traffic wardens walking around looking at
law abiding people who are five minutes over paying their parking.
Why can you not work with local authorities so if they see a car
or a motorcycle that has not got a licence they can immediately
report it?
Mr Bennett: We do, in fact, with
local authorities, and with the police indeed. If they see any
vehicle, whether it is a motorcycle or a car, they will actually
send in a notice.
Q9 Chairman: Without a licence?
Mr Bennett: Without a licence.
They will send a notice and then we take that through.
Q10 Chairman: They do that as a matter
of course, do they?
Mr Bennett: Absolutely. That is
a standard enforcement approach.
Q11 Chairman: So every traffic warden
as he is walking around in London is told, "As well as seeing
whether they are five minutes over you must also check whether
this car has got a licence"?
Mr Bennett: I would not say every
traffic warden. What I am saying is that the local authorities
and the police do report regularly when they see a vehicle that
is not taxed and we then follow up on that. How effective that
is in its totality would be difficult to measure.
Dr Hickey: Could I perhaps add,
Chairman. You are absolutely right, this is a central issue. The
problem is not so much finding people who are not paying their
tax, that is not too difficult using technology or people or whatever,
the real challenge is the physical resources to do so because,
by definition, these are people who are not going to respond to
letters and all that stuff. The amount of seizing of vehicles
has been rising fairly sharply. The DVLA has doubled the amount
of wheel clamping it does. Working directly itself, but also through
local authorities, the amount has roughly doubled and for this
year we think it is going at about 124,000 seizures a year. In
parallel, the police are also greatly increasing the amount of
vehicles they seize, not just for VED (Vehicle Excise Duty) evasion
but also insurance and all sorts of other reasons, but VED is
often a very good indicator. The latest figures I have got for
the police are they are seizing about 136,000. In addition to
that, local authorities are seizing vehicles, sometimes because
they have got powers from DVLA but also for things like abandoned
vehicles, which is a problem in its own right. The latest figures
I have got for their seizures are around 136,000. Altogether,
taking those three, the DVLA, the police and local authorities,
we are talking of seizures of vehicles running at—there
is a bit of double-counting here—375,000, that sort of number.
Q12 Chairman: It sounds a lot but
it is time proportionate.
Dr Hickey: Yes, but it is a lot
and it is going up. There is a lot going on but you are absolutely
correct to say in the meantime the incentives may be working against
us, so it is a bit of an arms race.
Q13 Chairman: Yes. Do you think they
need any more powers? Can you give Mr Bennett any more powers?
Dr Hickey: Yes.
Q14 Chairman: Has he got all he needs?
Dr Hickey: No, he has not. I am
very pleased that the Chancellor announced last week a very important
extension of DVLA's powers which will come in in September 2008
as part of the Pre-Budget Report. One of the limitations that
DVLA have got at the moment is that they can only seize vehicles
which are on the publicly financed road and they are not allowed
to seize vehicles on roads maintained by third parties, for example
a housing association estate or a Tesco car park. There are all
sorts of bits of road where they cannot take action. The Chancellor
announced last week that will be changed from next September and
that is a very important extension to their powers.
Q15 Chairman: I think it is pretty
obvious why people do not want to pay their licence but you have
done enough research, you know what motivates people and you know
what can be done to stop it. Are the police saying, "It's
all very well but we are asked to do all these other things, we
don't have the time"?
Dr Hickey: No. To be fair to them,
they have increased their volume quite markedly, they have more
than doubled it in the last year or so. Individual police forces
vary, of course, but a lot of police are very well aware that
there is quite significant overlap between people who do not pay
their tax or insurance and—
Q16 Chairman: Can I just interrupt.
There is obviously this great underclass and they are committing
many other crimes as well. Is this an easy way of nabbing them?
You see the vehicle, the motorcycle, white van or whatever on
the road, without a licence, nab them for that, impound the vehicle,
put a clamp on it and you may even get them on something else
as well.
Dr Hickey: Absolutely.
Q17 Chairman: This is zero tolerance
policing.
Dr Hickey: Absolutely.
Q18 Chairman: How interested are
the police in all this then?
Dr Hickey: They are interested.
If you go out with a clamping team, an ANPR team, getting the
pings on the camera that say somebody appears not to be insured,
licensed, whatever, come through alarmingly quickly. The real
constraint for the police, as for us, for everyone involved, is
not so much spotting somebody, it is having the resources to then
physically pull them in, find out what the truth is and then,
if necessary, seize the vehicle.
Q19 Chairman: That is why I am talking
in terms of more spot checks because would that not get the word
out quite quickly in these communities and then you have physically
got them there.
Dr Hickey: Yes, indeed. That is
more obvious, as it were.
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