Clause 8 - Driving record
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
9:00 am
Stephen Ladyman (Minister of State, Department for Transport; South Thanet, Labour)
My apologies to you, Mrs. Anderson, for the fact that you had difficulty getting here on time today because of the traffic. I understand that it was London traffic, however, and therefore is the responsibility of the Mayor and not me.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) for giving me the opportunity to explain what the clause does and to discuss his amendments. In our last sitting, Sir Nicholas was kind enough to give me a little leeway, because some clauses make sense only if discussed in association with others. Therefore, I shall explain not only what clause 8 does but what clauses 9 and 10 do, because they make sense only as a package.
My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris), who is not quite with us yet, told us that he has six points on his licence. It is fairly well known that once upon a time I had nine points on mine. I hasten to add that I have addressed my offending behaviour and that, as the points are now all four years old, they are expunged.
The legal record of our endorsements is the paper counterpart that the individual holds. Any record of endorsements held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is held simply for administrative purposes and to ensure that, should one lose one’s licence or should an appropriate person need to check that the licence is genuine, it has a record of the number of points that have been accumulated over the years. However, the legal record is the paper licence. Therefore, if a policeman is to offer someone a fixed penalty of, say, three points and a fine instead of taking them to court, he must first check the legal record to see how many points have previously been accumulated. Clearly if one is in the position that I was in for a period, with nine points on the licence, the next three points mean a court case and disqualification. The policeman must therefore check the legal record before he can issue a three-point standing penalty. Without being able to check the legal record, he does not know whether the offence in question is the first offence, the third offence or the 53rd offence.
The consequence is that a person who does not have a paper counterpart cannot be issued with a fixed penalty notice, and that applies to foreign drivers. People from the rest of the European Union who are driving in this country do not have a counterpart to their licence; they simply show us their national licence. The police cannot, therefore, check their situation and issue them with a fixed penalty. Likewise, somebody who has lost their paper counterpart cannot present it to the police to get a fixed penalty notice.
If we allowed that situation to persist, it would make nonsense of the later clauses in the Bill, under which we take a deposit from people rather than allow them to abscond without paying the fixed penalty notices, and other measures in the Bill would not work either. We must therefore legislate to make the DVLA’s database the legal record. The paper counterpart will then no longer be the legal record. It will simply be a person’s reminder that penalty points have been awarded. When the legal record is the DVLA database, it will be appropriate to say that the police and others, when deciding whether to issue a fixed penalty, must be able to access that database.
First, clauses 8, 9 and 10 therefore change the legal record from the paper counterpart to the DVLA database. Secondly, they provide for foreign drivers who do not have a paper counterpart to be prosecuted from the new legal record—the DVLA database. Clause 10 extends that provision to those who carry a British driving licence. The idea is that, over the next two to three years, we will migrate the way in which we issue penalty notices to ensure that the enforcement can take place from the new legal record. The reason why that needs to be done in stages over two to three years is purely administrative and technical. As a result of the way the computers and databases are constructed, it cannot be done all at once.
I take it that these are probing amendments that are intended to query to whom we will allow access to the database. Clearly, the police will have access to it. There are reasons why we want the Secretary of State to have the opportunity to use secondary legislation in the future to change the access arrangements. First, there might be good reasons why we want to give others access to it in future. The hon. Member for Wimbledon asked for examples of where that would be appropriate. One would relate to Hackney carriage authorities: local authorities deciding on licences for taxi drivers. They need to check whether individuals have a clean driving licence before issuing a taxi licence. We might give the power to that group.
I stress that we have no plans at this stage to do this, but we ought to be debating and considering whether would we want insurance companies to have access to the information. They are another possible group. Many of our colleagues in the House have confessed to me that they did not realise that they were supposed to tell their insurance company when they got speeding points. That convenient lapse of memory on some people’s behalf probably saves them a great deal of money, because as soon as someone starts accumulating speeding points, their premiums go up.
It might be that at some future point we will want insurance companies automatically to be able to check whether someone has speeding points, in order to ensure that people who do are honest about it and pay the appropriate premiums. We have no plans along those lines, but as parliamentarians, we might want to discuss and consider the matter at some point in the future. We might reasonably want to give people access to the database in such areas.
When we proposed the idea originally, only the negative procedure was to be used for the statutory instrument. We were advised by Committees of Parliament that people thought that the matter was so serious that it should be dealt with through the affirmative procedure. The Bill now includes provision for the affirmative procedure, so any secondary legislation that is introduced will need the positive confirmation of both Houses. That is appropriate, given the seriousness of the matter.
The hon. Gentleman briefly touched on access to public information such as the vehicle record. There has been some debate on that issue recently. He will be aware that there is a great deal of controversy about access to the vehicle record that the DVLA holds and about whether the DVLA is giving that information out to the right people. It is required to give it out to people who have a lawful right to have it. People who have a justifiable claim to see the vehicle record have a lawful right to have access to it, but that is not clearly defined in the legislation.
In order to clarify to whom it is appropriate to give vehicle information in future, I have announced a thorough consultation on the matter, after which we will consider whether we should change the rules about accessing the vehicle record. The clause has nothing to do with the vehicle record; it is concerned with the driver record. Currently, the only people who would see the legal driver record—the counterpart—are those to whom the driver willingly shows it or is required to show it to because legislation gives someone the power to see it. Our intention in the first instance, at least, is that the only people who will have access to the new driver record are those exact same groups of people.