I am very grateful for the opportunity of raising on the Adjournment the question of the enforcement of goods vehicles licence regulations, and I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport is as grateful to me as I am to you, Mr. Speaker, because this seems to me to be a subject which has been proved to be too substantial to be usefully pursued in Questions but might be regarded as peripheral to a major debate on transport policy.

Since I indicated my wish to raise this matter on the Adjournment, we had yesterday a statement by the Minister of Transport about roadside spot checks of heavy goods vehicles. I should like to congratulate the Minister on having sensitive antennae, and I would like to believe that this was because of the powerful advocacy which he knew would be exercised this evening in persuading him to take action. Whatever the Minister may have promised to do, there is certainly no indication that it is adequate to deal with the problem as I see it. In any case, I hope the Parliamentary Secretary will say a little more in expansion of yesterday's statement.

I was particularly struck by one phrase used by the Minister when he said that a lunatic fringe of operators fail to maintain their vehicles. As I hope I shall show, and as I think the Parliamentary Secretary will know, this is a very big fringe indeed, and that is why the problem is so serious and why it should be looked into.

I am not concerned with the overall question of the enforcement of "A", "B" and "C" licences. Nor am I concerned this evening with the overloading of goods vehicles; this is most important but, as I understand it, this is really a question for the local authorities' weights and measures inspectors. I am mainly concerned with excessive hours of work and with maintenance. I am concerned for two different reasons—first, the most obvious one of public safety, and secondly, because of the need for fair competition. This is a problem which has caused a good deal of public attention lately.

I refer, for example, to an article in The Times of 5th November last, the title of which—"Lorry driver was happy to pay a £10 fine"—tells part of the story. Another article in the same newspaper of 11th February was entitled: "Motorway Cowboys Need Curbing."

There was also a rather interesting B.B.C. "Panorama" programme recently, and I should like to refer to one or two of the things which were said in the course of that programme because they indicate the nature of the problem. The programe dealt with checks on road vehicles, and I should like to quote from a transcript of it: In two hours here Ministry of Transport inspectors pulled 67 lorries into the side of the road. Their inspection of this random harvest revealed that more than half of them were defective. Two of them were considered too dangerous to travel another yard. In the same programme, when a lorry driver was asked what happened when he declined to take out a vehicle which he thought was inadequately maintained, he replied: I got my cards the same night. Later the commentator said: In a savagely competitive industry it's the honest driver and operator who are being hardest hit by undercutting, overloading, and drivers working longer than is safe. That gives a fair picture of the position and of the great public concern about it.

This problem has been mentioned in evidence presented to the Geddes Committee. In particular, I would refer to the evidence presented by the T.U.C. where, among other things, they say: There is extensive evidence that the regulations governing hours of work, period of rest and maintenance of vehicles are widely disregarded. This is mainly because of the intense competition and rate cutting which is still going on despite the efforts of the more responsible type of haulier to prevent it. I hope that the fact that the Geddes Committee is sitting will not be used as an excuse for inaction. In recent years the Minister of Transport has established a number of Committees. We have had Beeching, Hall, Buchanan, and Smeed. Each has from time to time been used as an excuse for postponing taking action.

I am not concerned with the overall question of what the licensing system should be, so whatever the Geddes Committee might recommend and whatever the Government of the day, enforcement will remain a problem. I want to refer to the annual reports of the various licensing authorities, particularly those covering 1962–63. I hope that the Minister will undertake to look at the form in which these reports are presented to discover whether it would be possible to have more comparable data in future. Each of the licensing authorities presents its report in a different way. The Northern Traffic Authority, for example, finds space for 20 headings, Yorkshire for five and the North Western four, but un-numbered. It is difficult to compare one report with another. One has a large number of paragraphs thanking people who helped him when he was a licensing authority because he is due to retire.

It must be remembered that these are serious documents. Indeed, in many respects they are the basic documents available for a study of the ways in which the present licensing system works. Without saying precisely what can be done, I hope that the Minister will look at the form of these reports and try to find a way of improving them in future.

Despite this, and despite the lack of comparable data—including the lack of information and statistics about persistent offenders, about which I asked a supplementary question in the House recently—together with the lack of information about the penalties that have been imposed, I want to look in more detail at these reports to see what they tell us about whether or not the present standards of maintenance are adequate.

The Report of the North-Western Traffic Area stated: The continued high percentage of defective vehicles indicates that there is no noticeable improvement in the standard of vehicle maintenance … The West Midland Traffic Area stated in its Report: … offences relating to hours and records show no signs of decreasing. The Report of the East Midland Traffic Area stated: The fact that 1 in 4 goods vehicles are still found to be sufficiently defective to warrant prohibition leaves no room for complacency". Meanwhile, the Report of the Metropolitan Traffic Area stated: …five years ago … I reported that 12,160 goods vehicle inspections had been carried out and that the general run of examinations revealed that 10·1 per cent. were defective to the point of prohibition. The Report stated that 33 per cent. of vehicles had been found defective to the point of prohibition in the period under review. Thus the percentage of defective vehicles is increasing.

On several occasions my hon. Friends and I have pressed the Minister to say where there are adequate inspectors to do this checking. We have been led to believe that there are sufficient. But considering these reports and the evidence available, one sees that the authorities concerned are unanimous in complaining that they cannot do their job properly because they do not have sufficient staff. Either the Minister has been right in the past—in which case the licensing authorities are not telling the whole truth—or the authorities have been right, and the Minister has been concealing something from us. But these reports of the licensing authorities are a powerful indictment of the lack of enforcement and the failure of enforcement to achieve its purpose.

To summarise, of the total vehicles on the roads only one in 15 has been examined this year, and of that number about one-third have been found defective—33,903 defective vehicles out of 97,067. That seems to me to be a serious position. I would particularly like the Parliamentary Secretary to say something more about the spot checks which will take place and to make clear whether these can be conducted by the inspectors of whether the inspectors will require police assistance in the stopping of vehicles. Secondly, will the hon. Gentleman say something about the effort to recruit further enforcement officers? I understand that their pay varies from £913 to £1,532. Does the hon. Gentleman regard these rates as adequate remuneration for people who are charged with these heavy responsibilities?

Thirdly, could the hon. Gentleman say, particularly in relation to hours of work, whether the examiners are free to inspect the wage sheets as well as log sheets? This would be one way of making sure that drivers are not working overtime, because we know that these figures can be concealed in other ways. It is often said that the penalties imposed are regarded as normal business expenses. Does the hon. Gentleman take that view? If he does, can anything be done to emphasise the importance of causing penalties to be imposed which produce the results intended? Are steps taken to publicise those penalties which are adequate and severe enough in the hope that some operators will regard it as worth while keeping within the law?

In the present circumstances, if each of the inspectors that we have tested 10 vehicles a day for seven days a week it would take three years to test the whole of the goods vehicle fleet, by which time a further 150,000 vehicles would be coming on the road. In the "Panorama" broadcast to which I referred one of the drivers commented at the end on the position as he saw it. It seemed to me to be a fair commentary on the position as it seems to be. He was asked whether anything could be done about pirate operators. He said that it was a hard point to answer and added: I mean it's gone on and gone on and I suppose it will go on, no matter what we say and what we don't say. It will still carry on. Is that the Parliamentary Secretary's view? If it is not, what is going to be done about this serious problem?