Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
DEPARTMENT FOR
TRANSPORT & DVLA
17 OCTOBER 2007
Q40 Mr Mitchell: Why did that take
you by surprise?
Mr Bennett: Basically, internally
what we can check very easily is that people who are on the register
are complying more. For example, if we take what we receive, our
Electronic Vehicle Licensing was up by 93%, to an annual take
up of 39%. so we had 93% more transactions coming through (the
electronic route) which made it easier for people, therefore they
were more likely to comply. Our late licensing penalties, the
penalties we were talking about earlier where people have not
SORN'd or taxed their vehicles, have actually dropped by 6.5%
over two years. Our reports from the police and local authorities
have gone down by over 20% over four years. Our ANPR activity
on the road, the number of hits we were getting from ANPR vehicles,
has dropped by 8.5%. Every sign that we had internally was that
it was working.
Q41 Mr Mitchell: You must have known
you were trusting people too much because you were dealing with
crooks.
Mr Bennett: The point I was getting
at was that is what you can measure during the year. The problem
is you can only measure those people who are not taxed and do
not comply when you do the roadside survey because they then cover
the road and look at how many vehicles are not registered at all.
The trouble is we cannot deal with a vehicle that is not registered,
this is the difficulty, because we cannot get to the keeper. The
only way to deal with that, as we said earlier on, is to stop
the vehicle, clamp it, and those we do deal with. The wheel clamping
is the mechanism whereby we do hit some of the hardened evaders.
Q42 Mr Mitchell: That is a police
job, is it not?
Mr Bennett: We have a certain
level of wheel clamping.
Q43 Mr Mitchell: Now you have got
this electronic vehicle identification system, suppose it identifies
a wrong `un, what happens then?
Mr Bennett: We only have the powers
in DVLA to measure—
Q44 Mr Mitchell: Does the camera
tell you there is something wrong with this?
Mr Bennett: Yes.
Q45 Mr Mitchell: And what happens then?
Mr Bennett: If we get a vehicle
that comes past and it is not taxed against our database we can
then take that process through our enforcement process, and we
do, because we have the registered keeper and we can take the
matter through. In some cases we cannot make it stick, and I mentioned
that earlier. Even after getting the camera we cannot always make
that case stick, but we do know about those.
Q46 Mr Mitchell: And you cannot track
them down?
Mr Bennett: If there is a vehicle
that comes past that is not on our database, that is not registered,
it will ping the ANPR, and therein lies the problem. This is where
the wheel clampers would have to catch the vehicle on the road.
We cannot get to the keeper because there is no keeper's address
associated with the car, and that is where it gets difficult and
that is where we depend upon the physical part.
Q47 Mr Mitchell: That seems like
a disastrous failure. How do your methods of enforcement compare
in organisation and effectiveness with the BBC's procedures for
enforcing licence fees?
Mr Bennett: Our licensing evasion
is about the same as the BBC's actually in total volume.
Q48 Mr Mitchell: Is it?
Mr Bennett: Yes.
Mr Mitchell: That is based on what?
Q49 Chairman: It is the same people
perhaps!
Mr Bennett: Probably. It is about
the same volume.
Q50 Mr Mitchell: Is it the same people?
Mr Bennett: Interestingly enough,
TV licensing 5.1% evasion. The difficulty is this area of when
you do not have a registered keeper with a name and address, how
do you follow up? The only way you can is you grab them at the
roadside with their vehicle and that is what we, with the wheel
clamping, or the police do or the local authority.
Q51 Mr Mitchell: You seem to have
difficulties in dealing with what you might call recidivists where
there is a hardened evader and you catch him but then nothing
happens subsequently to guarantee that he does not evade again
or to stop him evading again.
Mr Bennett: That is the difficulty.
If you deal with a hardened evader and put him on the register
then once you have got them on the register they become part of
the process of taking them through the normal registration. Once
you have got them it becomes much easier but, of course, that
does depend on the fact that you can catch them in the first place.
Q52 Mr Mitchell: Even if you catch
them in the first place you cannot keep track of their later evasions.
Mr Bennett: If you have got them
on the database, if they pay the tax or they have SORN'd the vehicle
and legalised themselves, from that point on Continuous Registration
will track them because it will send reminders to their address
and if they do not pay it will chase them through.
Q53 Mr Mitchell: You do not attach
anything to their record and say, "Watch this so and so"?
Mr Bennett: We will have a record
on our database. The problem we have got is if a person is prone
to evasion, you catch them the first time but they will not necessarily
come forward the second time and they then become part of the
hardened evaders we take through the court system.
Q54 Mr Mitchell: You have a very
trusting view of humanity. When I was young and dashing, which
was not too many years ago, before I began to suffer from Menzies
Campbell disease, I had an MGB GT sports car, registration OKU
836H, which gives you the year. Some idiot drove into the back
of it and it had to be largely reconstructed. I was driving around
for a long time getting parking tickets delivered on the spot
to a vehicle OKW 836H, which I did not pay because I did not have
such a vehicle. I had not bothered to look at the licence plates
anyway. It was not until several months after the reconstruction
of the car when I was stopped driving down the M1 that the police
pointed out I had got a different licence plate at the front than
I did from the licence plate at the back.
Dr Hickey: This is the kind of
problem we face sometimes.
Chairman: Austin, it sums up your life
really, does it not?
Q55 Mr Mitchell: You would never
have found out, would you?
Mr Bennett: We would probably
have photographed you from one end or the other, so we would have
picked up something. We would have either seen you as being compliant
or non-compliant.
Q56 Mr Mitchell: You do not photograph
front and back.
Mr Bennett: We can photograph
from either with our particular ANPR cameras, yes. We can do four
lanes at a time now, which has increased our capacity to do that,
on a motorway for example.
Q57 Mr Mitchell: There is an organisation
here called the Intelligent Transport Society,[2]
and clearly I am not a member, that suggests putting chips in
licence plates for easy and straightforward amplification. Would
that be a very expensive and difficult system to operate?
Mr Bennett: It is technically
possible. From our point of view, we have effected a trial with
chips in number plates and technically you can use chips in number
plates as effectively as you can use ANPR for the camera. The
big issue, of course, is the putting in of the volume of the infrastructure
to deal with it and how much that would cost. That is something
we are still looking at.
Dr Hickey: It links to the earlier
question from Dr Pugh about the security of number plates and
whether if you had chips the security level would be increased
quite markedly. If we could wave a magic wand and it all happened
then, indeed, that would be more secure. The difficulties with
it are that you would have to first of all get agreement about
the standards and in particular is this just a UK thing or will
it be a Europe-wide issue, and a lot of these issues are Europe-wide.
For a kick-off, we would have a whole pile of discussions around
Europe. Even when you had got that agreed you would then have
a big roll-out programme because we have got 35 million vehicles
out there and would we do it only for new vehicles, in which case
it would take 10 or 15 years to roll-out, and there would be a
lot of cost around that. The final thing in the equation is even
if you had chips in you would have to have readers that can read
them, and the ITS are correct to say there are readers technically
that can do that but the clever criminal would find ways round
that. I am sure they would find ways of disabling their chips
so they become invisible, as it were. That is a problem with the
enforcement of road pricing, for example. You would probably still
have to have cameras and number plates even in a world where chips
were ubiquitous. It is a very interesting notion they have got,
it is certainly one worth bearing in mind, but it is not something
we think is going to happen any time very soon, and it is certainly
not in itself, nothing is, a magic wand that solves that.
Q58 Mr Mitchell: It would not demand
legislative action.
Dr Hickey: It would if it was
going to become mandatory.
Q59 Mr Mitchell: If I could just
ask you about the underclass. I do not get this. Tackling a vehicle
underclass, what is that? That is not the owners, that is the
nature of the car, is it?
Mr Bennett: These are the people
who will not register their car or will not relicence or SORN
their car.
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