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Road Safety Bill [HL]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that the problem of heavy goods vehicles in rural areas is a growing one? It is not simply a question of people living in rural areas not wanting to be bothered by nasty lorries; that really is not the case. The problem is that over the past decade there has, quite correctly, been a policy of diversifying farm sites. Quite often these are turned into heavy goods operating sites. It appears to be a sensible use of some of these sites. But the problem is that there is a lacuna in the system for licensing them in that the required operating licence takes into account only the confines of the site up to where it joins the highway. The local planning authority, the highways authority, has no say in the matter at all if it is a small site, say, with fewer than five vehicles, because then it does not come within the remit of the planning system. Even if it is a slightly larger site, the local authority is allowed to take into account only the effect that that one site has on the local traffic system. It is not allowed to take into account the cumulative effect of having lots of small sites in one area. Left with that problem, many local authorities attempt to manage the HGV traffic with weight restrictions on some roads, particularly where they go through larger villages and towns, but as we have heard from my noble friend there is a real problem with enforcing those restrictions. The police have to follow the vehicle from the start of the weight restriction to the end, and if the vehicle does not stop at any point the police can prove that it did not need to be there. As noble Lords can imagine, the police have far better things to do with their time. I hope that the Minister will give this some serious thought and that his department might think about a slightly different way in which those sorts of sites could be licensed.