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Road Vehicles (Powers to Stop) Regulations 2011

My Lords, I am pleased to introduce the Road Vehicles (Powers to Stop) Regulations. The purpose of these regulations is to provide examiners from the Department for Transport’s Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, or VOSA, with direct powers to stop commercial vehicles at the roadside throughout Great Britain in order to enable them to conduct compliance checks. These compliance checks are to ensure that commercial vehicles and drivers of commercial vehicles comply with the requirements of EU legislation relevant to vehicle roadworthiness and driving requirements. For example, EU legislation prescribes minimum standards of technical compliance for vehicles circulating on our roads. There are rules that prescribe maximum weight limits for commercial vehicles. There are also very detailed rules about maximum driving time and rest periods and about the recording equipment and records that are needed to verify compliance with these rules. Of course, all these requirements and rules are there to help to keep our roads safe, but they are effective only if there is adequate enforcement. Consequently, the legislation also stipulates that member states must put in place appropriate systems and checks for compliance, which is something that we would want to do in any event, regardless of the country of origin of the vehicle and driver. As things stand, VOSA already has a limited power to stop vehicles for checking in England and Wales. It has the power to do so under provisions in the Police Reform Act 2002—or, more precisely, the law allows chief officers of police to accredit individual VOSA examiners with the power to stop vehicles in order to carry out roadworthiness checks. Although this is a rather cumbersome administrative process, the general arrangements for enabling VOSA to stop vehicles for inspection work well in practice, since they save time in overall terms both for the police and for VOSA. They also release police officers for front-line duties when they would otherwise have had to stop vehicles for VOSA, as they used to do in the past. The main problem is that these arrangements do not apply in Scotland, which currently commits the police to having to support VOSA at roadside enforcement checks. The draft regulations before the Committee today will resolve that problem. Under the provisions of the draft regulations, VOSA officers appointed by the Secretary of State will be able to stop commercial vehicles for checking throughout Britain without having to have a police officer present. The main benefit that this will bring is that it will release a significant amount of police resources in Scotland that are currently taken up in assisting VOSA with this task. The regulations will also simplify the process of accrediting VOSA stopping officers. The proposal is that VOSA stopping officers will, in future, be appointed by the Secretary of State for Transport—in practice, that would be done by the chief executive of VOSA—rather than by individual chief officers of police. Of course, no one will be authorised as a stopping officer until they have successfully completed all the necessary training, which will be equivalent to the training that stopping officers in England and Wales currently have to undertake. The benefit of simplifying the process of appointing stopping officers will be in reducing the administrative burden on both the police and VOSA. The regulations will also extend the scope of VOSA’s stopping powers. At present, its stopping powers are specifically linked to vehicle roadworthiness checks, but its remit is much wider than that, extending to things such as checking compliance with maximum weight limits, drivers’ hours, operator licensing and driver training rules. I alluded to some of these matters earlier. Noble Lords may have noticed that the provisions under which these regulations are being made include Section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972. Section 2(2) of the 1972 Act provides the Secretary of State with powers to implement EU law via a statutory instrument where no such power already exists in primary legislation. In this case, Section 2(2) of the 1972 Act is required to ensure that we are fully compliant with EU law obligations in respect of these enforcement matters. While we are taking this procedural route to amend the law as it relates to Britain, we are also taking the opportunity to clarify the law as it relates to the whole of the UK, which is why the draft regulations also extend to Northern Ireland. As noble Lords will see, the regulations will also make some minor changes to the existing law in Northern Ireland, where examiners in the Driver and Vehicle Agency, which is Northern Ireland’s equivalent to VOSA in this respect, already have the ability to stop vehicles for compliance checks. The minor changes will simply confirm that DVA examiners can also stop vehicles in order to check compliance with goods vehicles authorisations and driver training rules, which are EU-wide provisions. Northern Ireland Ministers are content with these provisions, which will save them from having to take through separate, similar legislation for these very simple changes. To deter offending, these regulations also include offence provisions. They will make it an offence to impersonate a VOSA stopping officer or an examiner from DVA. They will also make it an offence to obstruct a VOSA stopping officer while he is carrying out his duties, although this offence does not extend to DVA examiners because equivalent provisions are already in force in Northern Ireland. Noble Lords may have noticed that I have made reference throughout to commercial vehicles. That is because EU law and, indeed, these regulations apply only to commercial vehicles. In England and Wales, the provisions of the Police Reform Act 2002 will remain in force, in order to allow VOSA to continue to make use of the option allowed under those provisions to stop other types of vehicles for roadworthiness checks—for example, light goods vehicles. I commend the draft regulations to the Committee.