Clause 34 - Registration plates
Road Safety Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Christopher Chope (Shadow Minister, Environment and Transport; Christchurch, Conservative)
The Road Vehicles (Display of Registration Marks) Regulations 2001, to which the Minister referred in answer to the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire, were discussed on the Floor of the House in 2001. During the course of that debate, I clearly recollect the Minister giving undertakings that amendments would be tabled to ensure that the GB symbol could be incorporated on number plates. When I last inquired about that, I was informed that it was taking a long time to draw up the necessary amending regulations, and that in the meantime I should not worry because people could put stickers over their number plate to indicate that it was a GB plate.
As the Minister knows, there is quite a lot of resentment that unless one spells it out to the contrary, the default position of most number plate suppliers is those ghastly stars. Sometimes, people do not realise that they are going to get the stars on their number plate until it is too late, but on a recent occasion when I specified to the vehicle supplier that I wanted a plate without stars and I ended up with a vehicle with stars, I am afraid that that cost the supplier some money, because he had to do it all again in accordance with the instructions I had given.
Some of us take that issue seriously, and the Minister will remember the debate, which was quite heated. The Government came under a lot of pressure to give way on that issue, and in the end they did. It is now three to four years since the debate, and the amendments that we were promised have not been brought forth. Will the Minister use the provisions of this Bill and clause 34 in particular as the means by which the amending regulations are brought forward or included in the Bill? That is another example of where the Government have failed to deliver even in accordance with their own words.