London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for raising these issues and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, for her helpful response in relation to this clause. As we have heard, the context for this clause is the impact on Londoners’ day-to-day lives that the Games and the Games operations will have, and the challenges, as well as opportunities, that businesses, employees and the general public need to plan ahead for. Transport for London is leading an extensive travel demand management programme to help people plan ahead and to influence the pattern of transport demand. In particular, through its travel advice to the business programme, which started last November, it is helping businesses to start considering now how they will operate during the Olympic and Paralympic Games period to minimise the impact of travel disruption on their operations. Transport for London is talking to businesses of all sizes to help them plan for the Games and is advising businesses that they may need to consider reducing travel or changing to another mode, re-timing or re-routing journeys to ensure that they can not only keep on running efficiently but benefit from the opportunities that the Games will bring. To support this wider programme of encouraging businesses to plan for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, TfL argued in evidence to the Public Bill Committee in another place, that in order to ensure that businesses in London can continue to receive goods deliveries and that operators can arrange delivery times that are compliant with Games-time restrictions, amendments to goods vehicles legislation are required. This clause therefore addresses TfL's concerns by bringing forward a small number of essentially technical amendments. To set some context, operator licences are granted by traffic commissioners, who are independent office holders statutorily appointed by the Secretary of State for Transport. One matter that a traffic commissioner is required to consider when granting a licence is the suitability of the operating centre where vehicles will be usually kept. Under the current process, on applying for an operator's licence, or on seeking a variation to their licence, an operator must advertise their application in a local newspaper. In addition, traffic commissioners publish all applications received in a document called Applications and Decisions. There is an existing process by which operators may apply to vary the conditions of their licence, and traffic commissioners are planning to communicate early with all operators with environmental conditions that restrict their hours of operation to ask whether they wish to seek, under the current application procedures, a change in their route, hours or days of operation, if it is likely that they will be affected by the Olympics. In most cases, the Government would expect operators to plan for this eventuality and seek a variation via the normal procedures. Traffic commissioners plan to write to those operators who have environmental licence conditions reminding them of the need to consider this, so a number of different forms of communication will be used to ensure that people are aware of what they need to do and how they can continue to operate. However, despite such preparatory steps, the Government believe that there will be some operators who, due to unforeseen circumstances such as the award of a short-term haulage contract, or a short-notice change to an existing contract, will need to seek a relaxation of their environmental licence conditions very shortly before the start of the Olympics period. Government intervention is therefore necessary to ensure that, in such exceptional circumstances, operators can apply at short notice for a relaxation of their hours of operation, so that they can continue to make deliveries in areas affected by traffic restrictions during the Olympics period. As a result, Clause 9 provides for an expedited process which would: remove the statutory requirement that an Olympics-related application be advertised by the operator who submitted the application; remove the requirement for traffic commissioners to publish the application; retain the statutory power for a traffic commissioner to hold public inquiries to seek further information to inform their decision as to whether to grant an application; and remove the statutory requirement that the notice period for a public inquiry can be abridged only if the consent of all persons entitled to attend a public inquiry is given. Certain consequences will flow from this. First, local residents and statutory objectors will not receive advance notice of specific applications, although a decision made by the traffic commissioner must still be published. Secondly, the statutory appeal route for statutory objectors will not be available. Of course, this does not remove other legal remedies such as the right of judicial review, which is currently the only route available for local residents anyway. We have considered very carefully whether it is proportionate and justified to remove some safeguards. We consider that it is. Without short-circuiting existing procedures, there will be no way that an urgent application, arising from unforeseen circumstances, can be dealt with quickly enough. However, importantly, traffic commissioners' powers to determine individual applications would be retained including their powers to impose additional conditions to counter any additional environmental nuisance that may result. Retaining the discretion of traffic commissioners and their knowledge of operators and localities when considering individual applications will help to avoid any abuse of this temporary flexibility. An alternative approach that we considered was to allow for a blanket relaxation of hours of operation for all haulage operators with such restrictions. However, we concluded that this would be too broad-brush and thus open to abuse by operators potentially leading to many complaints from local residents. Retaining the discretion of traffic commissioners under the shortened procedure is a sensible ““middle-ground”” approach. Taken together, these measures should help to ensure that, during Games time, goods can still be delivered and services provided, so that businesses can continue to operate and serve their customers and the public. With those reassurances, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to agree that the clause should stand part of the Bill.