Vehicle Registration Marks Bill

I am grateful for the interest shown in the Bill by my noble friend and for the way in which he moved his amendment. Hopefully, he will find the Minister's comments helpful. I am not aware that any noble Lord requires there to be discussion on Report. Therefore, unless the Committee agrees my noble friend's amendment, when the House resumes, I intend to move that Report be received. Clearly, the requirement to register number plate suppliers under the Vehicles (Crime) Act 2001 has had an undesirable effect on the level of number plate theft, as it has risen in recent years. With more than 35,000 registered suppliers, there is little chance that all suppliers are adhering to the law. I have touched on that in previous debates. The current design of the number plate is very easy to copy using readily available materials. I am sure that my noble friend will agree that the Bill is designed to simplify the process of transferring the right of possession of a cherished vehicle registration mark. It does not seek to improve the regulation of the manufacturer and supply of the plates, and is therefore not designed to impact on the problem that my noble friend describes. I can see what my noble friend is trying to achieve through the amendment. None the less, the more tamper-proof and theft-resistant a number plate is, the more damage may be done to a vehicle by a criminal intent on stealing the plate. For example, if a number plate is fixed securely to the bumper—the plastic moulding—the criminal would remove the whole of the bumper, causing even more damage to the vehicle. Even if a plate subsequently breaks up when it is being removed, there is still expense to the owner of the vehicle, who will need to replace the plate and, now, the bumper. Furthermore, even if the plates were supplied centrally, that would not completely stop the number of forged number plates, even if they were chipped, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, suggested, because a chip can be cloned as well. Until the number plate ceases to be the only overt form of identification of a vehicle and its vehicle, criminals will find a way to commit crime by using number plates as a means to evade arrest and traffic-related fines. However, if the engine management system computer were used to identify a vehicle, criminals would find it much harder to steal and clone a vehicle's identity. The engine management system could emit a signal containing the vehicle identification number, the VIN, as a way to make the vehicle identifiable. That could be made more secure than the chip to which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, referred, because it would be a much more complicated system. Perhaps it could even change the signal over time, increasing security. Then, ANPR systems could read the number plate as well as the signal from the engine management computer and match the two to ensure that they both belong to the same vehicle. As the engine management computer is an expensive but reliable item, it could easily be strictly controlled by the manufacturers’ main agents only. At the moment, we are trying to control something that is cheap and easily manufactured by anyone. It would be much better to control the engine management system. ANPR is still in its infancy and cloning will be a temporary phenomenon. As new technology is introduced, number plate cloning will be harder to get away with, because a copied plate will be quicker to identify. If my number plate were read by an ANPR machine in London, and supposedly read again 20 minutes later in Leeds, it would be clear that one of the vehicles was cloned. The police could then take action, principally by stopping both vehicles displaying the suspect number plates. Of course, the number of traffic police is outside the scope of our debate. I hope that my noble friend found the Minister’s intervention helpful, and that he will withdraw his amendment.