Instruments drawn to the special attention of the House
Draft Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 5) Regulations 2021
Date laid: 23 November 2021
Parliamentary procedure: affirmative
These Regulations remove the obligation for car and van drivers towing a trailer to take an additional test. They have had to be re-laid, with an Explanatory Memorandum (EM), due to a procedural error. While we appreciate the objective is to free up capacity at test centres to enable more HGV drivers to obtain their licences, our 15th Report raised safety concerns about the possibility of towing accidents increasing and suggested that, if the data is unclear, the position should be reviewed earlier than the three years set out in the Regulations. The House has followed up these issues in debate and in questions, but the re-laid version of the EM is silent about these concerns. We wrote to the Minister about this omission. The Minister’s response neither reduced our concerns about these safety issues nor offered any reassurance that the Department understands the critical importance of evidence-based policy and the respect that should be accorded to Parliament and its scrutiny processes.
These Regulations have been scheduled for debate in Grand Committee next Tuesday, 14 December. We are publishing this Report in advance so that it is available to those participating in the debate. However, as this Report makes plain, we are deeply dissatisfied with the Department for Transport about its approach to these Regulations and, for this reason we have invited the Minister to give evidence to explain the policy choices she has made.
These draft Regulations are drawn to the special attention of the House on the ground that the explanatory material laid in support provides insufficient information to gain a clear understanding about the instrument’s policy objective and intended implementation.
Background
1.These Regulations (“the No. 5 Regulations”) duplicate the Draft Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations (“the No. 2 Regulations”)1 laid on 16 September 2021which could not be made due to a procedural error in the House of Commons.
2.They would remove the requirement for car and van drivers in the UK to take a towing licence (the B+E licence) so as to free up capacity at testing centres for Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) tests.
3.Our 15th Report2 on the No. 2 Regulations criticised the Department for Transport (DfT) for:
- failing to provide any information about the potential for towing accidents to increase if the test requirement was removed;
- only proposing to review this change after three years–given the lack of safety data we suggested 12-month intervals would be more appropriate;
- proposing to remove the tests “on an experimental basis”–we suggested a proper review was required first, and
- for failing to provide an Impact Assessment (IA) and full analysis of the responses to the consultation exercise.
4.When the No. 2 Regulations were debated in the House of Lords on 9 November,3 several members raised these issues and other points including current administrative delays in issuing licences of all types. These matters have also been raised in oral questions.4
5.Despite these expressions of concern over road safety, the No. 5 Regulations and the re-laid Explanatory Memorandum (EM) are an exact duplicate of the No. 2 Regulations and the EM accompanying those Regulations—the EM has not been amended to reflect or respond to the issues raised in our 15th Report or those raised in the debate.
Failure to make information public
6.We wrote to the Minister, Baroness Vere of Norbiton, to ask the reason for this omission and, in her letter of 6 December, she said that the IA had just been submitted to the Regulatory Policy Committee (RPC) and that “it would be inappropriate to amend the EM in anticipation of the opinion of the RPC”. (The Minister’s letter is published in Appendix 1.)
7.We do not accept this reasoning:
- DfT’s factual explanations and incident data should not alter whatever the RPC makes of them. If the material is in a sufficiently developed form that it has now been submitted to the RPC, then it ought to be made available to Parliament–we have seen draft material on impact many times before, although the RPC’s view of it is preferred, it is not essential.
- Delaying the material gives the RPC, an advisory body, precedence over Parliament–which, as a result, is being asked to approve the Regulations without adequate information about its consequences.
- Some of the impact material has already been outlined in correspondence published in our 15th Report and in follow-up correspondence with the members who participated in the debate on 9 November. It is therefore in the public domain and should have been included in a revised EM.
- The EM is part of the public record and should provide the relevant information to every reader: that is why we put so much emphasis on the IA and other documentation being available when the instrument is laid, so that all interested parties can access it and, if they have concerns about it, can make representations to the Department or Parliament before the legislation becomes law.
8.Neither the full summary of consultation nor the IA are yet available even though 10 weeks have elapsed since the No. 2 Regulations were laid. These are not simply administrative matters. We are told that the risk assessment will be in the IA and that 32% of 8,753 respondents to the consultation expressed concerns about safety. We have not been told however the details of those concerns.
9.In response to an oral question in the House on 1 December, the Government announced that: “All car drivers wishing to tow a trailer for leisure or business will be encouraged to undertake a voluntary accreditation scheme, which is being developed with the help of the trailer industry and training providers. The scheme is planned to be launched early next year and will focus on a core model for all drivers, with sector-specific modules for different towing activities.” This suggests that the Department recognises that there are safety issues that need to be taken into account. Yet none of this is addressed in the EM accompanying the No. 5 Regulations, which blandly says any increase in accidents will need to be monitored.
Lack of information to support the policy
10.It appears that the Department does not have the information to respond to our concerns, so it is unclear how it can monitor future change effectively. In a letter published in our 15th Report, the Minister said that the Department was unable to discern from available data “how much the car trailer test has made a difference since it was introduced in 1997 or that there is a causal link between road safety and the test”. It is because the historic figures are unclear that we have recommended an earlier review than three years—but the Department has not responded to that point.
Urgency?
11.The Department’s rationale for pressing ahead with these Regulations in the absence of the appropriate information to support and explain the policy, is, it says, on grounds of urgency. We find this unconvincing because the Minister’s correspondence indicates that the policy has already been implemented administratively:
- In a letter dated 18 October, the Minister said: “Stopping Category B+E testing as a temporary measure has already increased the number of HGV tests available by around 550 per week.”
- In a letter dated 29 November to members of the House who took part in the debate on the No. 2 Regulations, the Minister said: “significant improvement has already been made to increase testing availability, the Driver and Vehicle Stands Agency (DVSA) national vocational test waiting time currently under two weeks … . In October 2021, DVLA issued 31% more provisional Vocational Driving Licences (10,531) and DVSA conducted 38% more large goods vehicle tests (9,391) than before the pandemic in October 2019.”
12.The House may wish to ask the Minister to explain what further gains will be made if this instrument were to be brought into effect immediately rather than delaying it until the appropriate supporting material is available.
Conclusion
13.We understand the need to increase the supply of HGV drivers and have scrutinised several previous instruments on DfT’s list of 32 interventions.5 These Regulations however raise questions about road safety which the Department appears unable to answer.
14.A lack of clear data is not unprecedented and, in such cases, we would expect a more cautious approach to be taken. In our 15th Report we asked why DfT did not simply suspend the test for 12 months while it compiled more evidence to support the abolition of the B+E test. As an alternative, in that Report we also suggested more frequent monitoring of accident rates than the three years the Regulations specify.
15.These Regulations provide yet another example of where the pandemic or Brexit or a combination of both is being used as a pretext to make a permanent change for which there is inadequate supporting evidence. In our recent report, Government by Diktat: A call to return power to Parliament, we raised a number of concerns about the Government’s use of secondary legislation and their attitude to parliamentary scrutiny.6 DfT’s failure to provide supporting explanatory material in this case reinforces those concerns, and in particular that the Department has no understanding of, or respect for, the need for Parliament to have access to the information necessary for effective parliamentary scrutiny.
16.We have drawn attention to a number of concerns about these Regulations, and members of the House have followed up these concerns, along with concerns of their own, in debate and in oral questions. Shockingly, the re-laid version of the EM makes no mention of them but simply repeats the EM laid alongside the No. 2 Regulations. We wrote to the Minister about this matter. The Minister’s response neither reduced our concerns about these safety issues nor offered any reassurance that the Department understands the critical importance of evidence-based policy and the respect that should be accorded to Parliament and its scrutiny processes.
17.These Regulations have been scheduled for debate in Grand Committee next Tuesday, 14 December. We are publishing this Report in advance so that it is available to those participating in the debate. However, as this Report makes plain, we are deeply dissatisfied with the Department about its approach to these Regulations and, for this reason we have invited the Minister to give evidence to explain the policy choices she has made.
1 Draft Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2021 SI 2021, withdrawn on 16 November 2021.
2 Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, 15th Report, (Session 2021–22 HL Paper 79).
3 HL Debs, 9 November 2021, cols 484-496 [Lords Chamber Grand Committee].
5 HM Government, ‘UK government action to reduce the HGV driver shortage’: https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/hgv-driver-shortage-uk-government-response/about [accessed 8 December 2021].
6 Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, Government by Diktat: A call to return power to Parliament (20th Report, Session 2021–22, HL Paper 105).