New Clause 5
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
6:30 pm
Stephen Ladyman (Minister of State, Department for Transport; South Thanet, Labour)
We are making good progress, and I hope that we can continue to do so.
Government new clauses 5 and 6 return to the Bill two clauses that were removed in the Lords. I like to think that that was because the Lords were mistaken in their intent, and that had they heard my arguments, they would not have done so. I hope that the Committee will agree to put them back in.
The fact is that there are in circulation not just photocard licences—licences with drivers’ pictures on them, each accompanied by a piece of paper establishing the driver’s details and any endorsements that he carries—but licences held by people who have never received a photocard. They have only paper licences and, therefore, have no photographic identification to establish that they may drive particular vehicles, which can present the police with considerable problems. When they stop somebody and are presented with a perfectly valid driving licence in the form of a piece of paper, they have no way of determining whether the person handing them that piece of paper is the person who is entitled to that driving licence.
It was our intention that the Bill would enable us to require, at various points in the future, the return of those paper driving licences, and the issuing in their place of photo ID card-type licences. Their lordships, mistakenly, I can assure the Committee and them if they are listening, thought that that might be a cunning plot to introduce the ID card by the back door, so they removed these clauses from the Bill. I assure the Committee that it was not an attempt to do any such thing. The driving licence is not designated as a document that one cannot receive without having first applied for an ID card. This is a sensible measure to improve law enforcement and to ensure that somebody who presents a driving licence is the holder of that licence.
As well as allowing the Government to charge for the process of changing licences at various times in the future, the clause will give the Government the power, if the licence changes again, to require people once again to submit their old licences in exchange for new-format ones. If, for instance, we decide in future to add a further security device to the driving licence, to make it even more secure and to try to improve the integrity of the database, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire requested, we will be able to do that under these new powers. In addition, the Committee agreed earlier that the paper part of the driving licence—the so-called counterpart—is no longer the legal document. In fact, the database of the DVLA will be the legal document for enforcement purposes in future.
One of the things that we will be able to do will be to require people to return their old paper licences, and to receive photo ID card-type licences. We will also be able to require people to return their existing photo ID card-type licences and to receive in return licences that include information about endorsements and so on—if that is what we wish to do—and to get rid of the counterpart. These are sensible measures. They will improve road safety and the enforcement of driving licences, and will help the police immeasurably. They will also help to improve the integrity of the DVLA database and they are in no way a Trojan horse that will allow ID cards to be introduced without the approval of Parliament.