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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

The problem for much of continental Europe is that they have much higher rates of offending. They have a low limit, but it is not actually enforced. The French Government have a big problem with this issue and have stepped up detection significantly in the past few years. What matters is that people need to know that there is a strong likelihood that they will be caught. We have been working with chief constables, who have to decide where to target their resources. I strongly believe that the police should target drink driving, because it is a problem, not only at Christmas time, but throughout the year. The second theme is measures to stop people who drive without tax and insurance. Continuous vehicle registration has helped and the House may be interested to know that vehicle licence evasion has fallen by 400,000 since 2002, which means that the revenue lost from evasion has dropped by £60 million in the same time. The Bill allows the regulation of registration plate suppliers to be extended to Scotland and Northern Ireland. It also enables us to share driver and vehicle data with foreign authorities. That is important, because one of the themes that has emerged, especially with more and more foreign vehicles being driven in this country, is the lack of access to information about who owns them. We need to do more to build co-operation across Europe on that issue. I hope that those measures will command support on both sides of the House, although I understand that in certain parts, co-operation with Europe creates some difficulties. When we first published the Bill, it enabled the Department to require the surrender of paper driving licences, probably some time after 2008, to allow them to be replaced with photo-card driving licences. That part of the Bill was removed in the other place. We will reintroduce that important measure, because the police need to be sure that the person they stop at the roadside is producing their own documents. Last year alone, the police brought to the DVLA’s attention approximately 1,200 cases in which individuals had set up more than one identity, and some of them had many identities. All of us know that the paper driving licence is reasonably easy to manipulate and therefore misrepresent. We should therefore introduce a photographic licence that has better security and makes such deception much more difficult. I am sorry that the Conservatives in the other place are opposed to that: I hope that the Conservatives here will take a more realistic view. The police and others rely on driving licences and they should be as secure as possible. We do not plan to make the change immediately, but at some point it will be necessary to recall paper licences and replace them with licences that are more robust.