Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
100-119)
DEPARTMENT OF
TRANSPORT AND
VEHICLE AND
OPERATOR SERVICES
AGENCY
Q100 Keith Hill: Mr Peoples, I am
right in thinking that you have records of which operators are
most likely to commit offences?
Mr Peoples: We do.
Q101 Keith Hill: Do you publish these
findings?
Mr Peoples: In terms of the operator
compliance risk score, each operator has access to their own scores.
This is not an operator rating scheme; it is not something that
can say because of our risk score on a particular operator based
on a number of encounters, that they are inherently bad; it just
says that is the risk that we have found. The issue we have got
is that this risk score can change from week to week, so each
operator has access to that risk score for whatever number of
vehicles they have got on their operator licence.
Q102 Keith Hill: The implication
of that is that your kind of targeting of vehicles belonging to
operators also changes week by week.
Mr Peoples: That is right.
Q103 Keith Hill: It does; it has
that degree of flexibility?
Mr Peoples: It does because it
is based on each encounter. If we have a positive encounter, it
has a positive impact; if it is a negative encounter, it has a
negative impact.
Q104 Keith Hill: Do you find there
are operators that are consistently at risk of committing offences?
Mr Peoples: We do. Recently, we
have followed up at operators' premises with those operators that
are consistently red, to try and understand what they understand
about the risk score, what they understand about the requirements
on them in law, and what work we can do with them to try and change
behaviours. Quite often these people are not found to be the criminal
types; they are found to be people who are unaware of—or
are unaware that their drivers are breaking the law. We have found
that working with them is starting to change behaviours amongst
those operators that we visited.
Q105 Keith Hill: I seem to remember
from the days of yesteryear, the Leitch Report, that actually
the average operator is quite a small-scale operator. What is
the average number of vehicles?
Mr Peoples: The vast majority
of operators have less than five vehicles.
Q106 Keith Hill: Fewer than five
vehicles, extraordinary, is it not? Let us just go back to this
business about inspectors visiting the premises, and to pick up
a point raised by Austin Mitchell, which is the suggestion by
the Road Haulage Association specifically that the Agency has
rather diminished its visiting of premises because it has been
eager to pursue the targets on roadside checks set by the Department.
Do you accept that allegation?
Mr Peoples: No, I do not accept
the allegation. We have changed the number of operator visits
for a number of reasons. The number of registrations, operator
licences, are falling, so that takes account of some of the downturn,
and we are now better able to segregate the number of new operators
that are coming online from those that have changed an operating
address or changed premises, where before each one of those generated
a new visit. As I said before, in terms of looking at red-rated
operators, we are now targeting those and going and talking to
those specifically.
Q107 Keith Hill: Let me ask you a
question about the risk rating scores. If you look at the figures
on pages 20 and 21, although there is some relationship between,
for example, the score on brakes and the risk of accidents, overall
there appears to be relatively little correlation between the
risk rating score and accidents; so that naturally provokes the
question: why do the risk rating scores not reflect more closely
the factors that lead to accidents?
Mr Peoples: The risk rating score
is a relatively new thing; it has been in force since 2007. Before
that we had very little in which to target. We had local intelligence,
so this is a major step forward from what we had. It is also evolving,
and the Permanent Secretary alluded to graduated fixed penalties
and deposits, which he has introduced, and that has now given
us much more information and granularity not only on which incidents
are happening, but the severity of those incidents, which we were
not able to capture before. We are evolving our risk rating score,
our operator risk compliance score, to take account of emerging
findings on those encounters that we are now having that are attracting
graduated fixed penalties.
Mr Devereux: Let us be candid,
though. We are clearly doing a lot of work, for example with overloaded
vehicles—the third bar on figure 9—which by any stretch
of the imagination is too much relative to what we are doing on
other things. One of the things that is happening with the sites,
many of which are actually fixed weighbridges, going back to the
days when overloading was the thing to worry about, is now under
the spotlight for VOSA to change. I think you would expect next
time you enquire about all this, that these scores more accurately
reflect that trend line.
Keith Hill: Fine, good. I accept the
point you are making but, nevertheless, it is an illuminating
bit of analysis by the National Audit Office. Let me revert to
the bashing of Johnny Foreigner—
Mr Mitchell: Hear, hear!
Q108 Keith Hill: —which has
characterised so much of our proceedings this afternoon. Let me
ask you why you still do not have a risk-rating system for non-British
operators.
Mr Devereux: The main reason is
because there is no obligation on any operator to give us any
information. The answer I was trying to develop with Mr Touhig
was this, that there is nothing to stop the Agency—and that
is what they are planning to do—compiling information that
they collect on individual encounters with individual international
lorries. Because they are the licensing authority for British
operators, they are allowed to hoover up all kinds of information
about British operators. If I stop truck number one and I find
it is from the same operator as truck number 99, I can actually
do something with truck 99 when I see it. With the international
operator, I have got no idea whether or not this truck belongs
to the same operator or not. We are trying, by our own bootstraps,
to collect this information together, but the fault which both
Mr Mitchell and Mr Touhig identified about what the information
flows between us and Europe are means we are precluded essentially
from having a European-wide operator-based compliance strategy.
Q109 Keith Hill: That is something
we need to look at more carefully in the European context. Let
me hurry on and go back to Mr Peoples and ask a question about
ANPR, Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology. If that is
as effective at targeting non-compliant operators and vehicles
as it appears to be from the NAO report, let me ask you: why are
only a quarter of your vehicles fitted with cameras?
Mr Peoples: What we are doing
as part of the HRTI is buying a number of new vehicles, and those
vehicles are already capable of being fitted out with mobile cameras.
We are also looking very shortly at the Agency at the business
case, to make the case for putting additional mobile cameras in
those new vehicles.
Q110 Keith Hill: Finally, let me
revert to a question which our Chairman put to you, but I think
I would like to have a more comprehensive answer, and that relates
to the fact that you stop relatively few red-rated vehicles: does
that not really cast doubt on your ability to target the right
vehicles?
Mr Devereux: I think that is a
fair question, but for the fact as—
Q111 Keith Hill: That is why the
Chairman asked it, Mr Devereux.
Mr Devereux: I was going on to
say it is a fair question, but if you look at figure 5, I am afraid
the evidence is that because our risk-scoring system is not as
brilliant as you would hope it is. It is not the case that all
the problem operators currently are scored as red operators. This
tells you why other vehicles are pulled over. The Agency is finding
in excess of 25% green operators have a mechanical fault. My view
is that that tells you that we have not perfected by any stretch
of the imagination a risk-scoring system that enables us to, with
confidence, say who we ought to be pulling over. Come the day
that I can identify 100% of bad vehicles straight away, that would
be where you would want to be with the red ones. I do not think
we are wasting time pulling over green and orange while the non-compliance
rates are as high as that, but it does beg the question: how could
you refine the risk-scoring system because these figures also
tell you that of the order of half to two-thirds are being pulled
over and found to be completely clean, as it were. There is a
real added value in making sure that every vehicle stopped has
really got something wrong with it. We are quite a long way down
this track. These numbers are well in excess of the population
levels of compliance, which for mechanical is around 10%—but
could we do better? Of course we could.
Q112 Mr Williams: It is an interesting
Report, but the bones have been picked pretty clean by my colleagues.
Why did you suspend your work with the Highways Agency on your
checksite project? What was behind that?
Mr Peoples: We were working with
the Highways Agency on something called the Enforcement Synergy
Programme, and it was quite clear that that work, while it was
providing some very useful information, caused us to think we
needed something more than what we were just getting, and we are
now working with the Department on an HGV compliance strategy
of which that highways work would form a part. We are also still
working with the Highways Agency on acquiring a number of sites,
and the Sandbach site is actually a Highways Agency site which
they have refurbished for joint use. Although we have moved back
from some of the more radical things we were talking about until
an overall HGV compliance strategy has been completed, we are
still working at a tactical level with the Highways Agency.
Q113 Mr Williams: Has the suspension
had any adverse impact?
Mr Peoples: No. A lot of the stuff
that we were working on was more medium-term outcomes, so we are
quite happy that we are doing the short-term stuff now, and we
are working very closely both with the Highways and the core Department
in terms of ensuring that the compliance strategy does take account
of that previous work.
Q114 Mr Williams: We were told you
have no right of access to ports. This is interesting. Why?
Mr Peoples: I believe it is because
they are private premises generally speaking, and they do not
fall within our remit, but it would be wrong—
Q115 Mr Williams: Why are they not
within the remit? Should they be within the remit? Would you like
them within the remit?
Mr Peoples: Clearly, all we want
is access to the ports. The mechanism or the legislative forum
for that is rather academic from our point of view. It is not
all ports—
Q116 Mr Williams: That is what I
was asking at the very start; access.
Mr Peoples: It is not all ports
that are denying us access. We have some very good relationships
and, indeed, we are working with the British Ports Association
to work up a memorandum of understanding to ensure that we do
have access to the rest.
Q117 Mr Williams: Why are some of
them so obstructive?
Mr Devereux: Because of competition:
this is a private industry and if it is the case that you would
be twice as likely to be caught by working alongside VOSA as some
other site, then why would you not ship your vehicles somewhere
else? What we are trying to establish here is something that gets
vehicles in and out of ports, which is quite important anyway,
but actually make sure that VOSA is in a position to check them
in some way. Physically checking them in the port premises is
not necessary. It is one way of doing it. If it can be done without
too much bottleneck and too much problem at the port, that is
fine. As I said earlier, the alternative of camping four or five
miles down the next motorway, as it were, is a perfectly adequate
way, if that is where we can find a site.
Q118 Mr Williams: If you had an automatic
right of access, surely that would eliminate any suspicion that
one port was getting the benefit over another?
Mr Devereux: It would in principle,
but some of these ports are very heavily constrained for space,
and so if there is not physical space to do all the work that
Alastair's people need to do, it will not happen then.
Q119 Mr Williams: We accept that
in that case you would not want access. Let us put the question
slightly differently. Should you not have access where you want
it and you think it would be appropriate, and do you have that?
Mr Devereux: Perhaps I can put
it another way round. If there was a passing legislative vehicle
to give Alastair access to every port, I am sure we would be pleased
with it. I am not at all sure we could demonstrate that it was
a proportionate response to the observed problem.
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