Vehicle Registration Marks Bill

My Lords, the Bill deserves support, but no more than that. It affects a few people, and I am certainly not going to oppose it. However, there are bigger problems that we ought to address. What are the Government’s intentions with regard to sorting out the absolute chaos in the supply and manufacture of number plates? Considerable investment has been made—the Government have played a large part in this—in safety cameras, to which the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, referred, and in the installation of automatic number-plate recognition, with which the police are now well equipped. Does the Minister have any idea of the amount of information that is now coming to the attention of the police on which they may act? They do not have the resources necessary to cope with that information. In the Thames Valley—I declare an interest as a member of that authority—we will have by the summer 60 automatic number-plate installations in cars and vans or alongside the roads. They will generate something like 80,000 hits a day. Eighty per cent of those will relate to cars that are administratively committing an offence; the owner has not paid their tax or insurance, the car does not have an MOT certificate, or for some other reason there ought to be an intervention. In fact the DVLA has told Thames Valley police: ““Don’t report those 60,000 a day, because we just can’t handle it””. That leaves 15,000 hits a day of vehicles that will be of interest to the police: vehicles that are stolen; that have stolen number plates; whose occupants are engaged in crime or are known offenders; or that contain people whom the police ought to stop and question—perhaps terrorists. That information is now becoming available to the police. Does the Minister consider it consistent that we have a sophisticated means of knowing that a vehicle needs to be stopped but alongside that we have what I can only describe as a haphazard system of licensing vehicles and marking them? I know that road traffic legislation does not come forward that often but it is time that the Government dealt with this issue—not necessarily in the Bill, because it is too much to hope that it will be amended. I seek some assurance from the Minister that a real effort will be made to tackle the nonsense of number plates. The system needs to be tightened up. It is abused and it is costing taxpayers huge sums of money. It is time a stop was put to the whole business.