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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

Like every Member who has spoken today, I welcome the Bill and wish it good passage on its way to the statute book, although we will have to see what the Lords do to it. However, I have a huge disappointment that the Minister will be well aware of. For more than 18 months, I and Bedfordshire police—and, indeed, many other police forces throughout the country—have been trying to convince the Government that there is a very real problem with drivers who register their vehicles to addresses where the police cannot contact them. In response to my intervention on a Front-Bench colleague a few moments ago, the Minister said that the Association of Chief Police Officers told him that that was not a problem. Merely asserting that to be the case does not make it so. Officers from Thames Valley police and from the forces of Suffolk, Greater Manchester, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Essex, Nottinghamshire, Humberside, Derbyshire, Wiltshire, Warwickshire, Norfolk and Kent, to name but a few—those who actually have to do the job—have told Bedfordshire police that there is a very real problem. They have tried to feed that message up through ACPO. Perhaps there is a blockage in ACPO and its senior people are not listening to the officers on the ground who have to enforce the law, but there is a very real problem here. I do not know why the Government have not moved on this matter; they have had plenty of warning. There have been two meetings at the Home Office and two at the Department for Transport, and we have had 18 months to look into this issue. In my constituency, there are horrendous examples of people driving unbelievably dangerously—speeding past cameras and jumping red lights time and again—whom the police can do nothing about. Bedfordshire police recently gave me a list of five fatalities, including that of an 18-month-old child, all of which could have been prevented if the Government had taken this issue seriously. The Government say that the current law works properly. They did not like the amendments that I tried to put before them—we would have had before us a new clause 17 tonight—but at no time have they come forward with their own proposals, or any others, to deal with this matter.