Clause 10 - All drivers
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
10:00 am
Stephen Ladyman (Minister of State, Department for Transport; South Thanet, Labour)
I shall deal first with the replacement document. The hon. Gentleman is right: if the Bill is passed, the counterpart will have no legal standing. In theory, therefore, when the DVLA sends an individual a driving licence, it could send simply the piece of plastic in an envelope, with nothing else in it. Clearly it would not be good business practice to send a piece of plastic with no explanation of what it was or how it was to be used. We would need to send people a holder for it, it needs to be held in the envelope and it needs some explanatory material. That explanatory material will have no legal standing. However, we will ensure that, in essence, it is the same information as that currently carried on the counterpart, so the individual will know what categories of vehicle they are entitled to drive, when they reach the age when the licence must be renewed and what endorsements are on the licence.
The endorsements will not be marked on the piece of plastic: they will be held on a computer somewhere else. Therefore, when the police want to check the endorsements, they will have to use the piece of plastic to obtain the information that they need to access the remote database. It is important that people have a piece of paper that says what their endorsements are. Whenever they get new ones and the driving record is changed, we will ensure that we write to tell them that that has happened.