My Lords, I, too, support all the amendments in the group, and am grateful for the kind words said about me by my noble friend Lord Bassam of Brighton and our debate last night.
The noble Baroness may be right that there are many things wrong with this Bill, but it is a great deal better than nothing. It affects only drivers’ permits and trailers. Last night in the discussion on Amendment 104, we discussed many other issues relating to cross-channel and cross-frontier freight and all the customs issues that went with them. As I think I said last night, it would be good if we had had a separate Bill for that so that we might have gone into the detail, but here we are. We had a very good Second Reading debate. My worry, which is contained in Amendment 7 in my name, is that when we discussed at Second Reading Clause 2, which is to do with the number and allocation of permits, it seemed to become quite confusing. One noble Lord—I cannot remember who—warned against the “random selection” in Clause 2(2) because it was greatly open to abuse. Perhaps that should be removed.
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I have had a certain amount of trouble getting some amendments accepted. I wanted to put forward an amendment on cabotage and was told that it was outside the scope, but perhaps we can look at that again.
My noble friend Lord Snape has said that the proportion of UK drivers crossing into southern Ireland is about 25%, which is the same figure that I have. My Amendment 14B, which we will come to later, is on the issue of how non-UK drivers can get licences. But under certain Brexit scenarios, the number of licences that the UK might have for going into other EU member states—I believe that that includes the Republic of Ireland—will be very small. It would be good if the Minister could give us some idea as to whether and how that could be increased.
My Amendment 7 requires that:
“The Secretary of State must take all reasonable steps to meet the demand for permits from UK hauliers”.
That would be a useful challenge to them to make sure that they did it fairly. There is more to come on that, and perhaps the Minister will come back with some other ideas at Report. As it stands, the industry will be fed up if it cannot even reach its 25%, never mind if that goes down to 5% or 10%. We are seeing even more foreign lorries coming in, even before we get to the discussion about how big our fuel tanks are and so on, which we will no doubt have. This amendment seeks to put the industry’s mind a little bit at rest.