My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group. These amendments have been laid to ensure clarity of purpose in the Government’s strategy. Amendment 12 seeks to get the Government to lay a report within a month of the Bill passing on forecasts of how the permits regime will affect the efficiency of haulage and in every year following. Amendment 13 asks that within three months of the Bill passing the Government produce a report setting out their expectations for future arrangements between the EU and the UK with regard to road haulage. Amendment 14 suggests that within three months of the Bill passing a report on the costs of the future international haulage permit scheme be published.
It is essential to business continuity that the industry knows what the Government are up to and what their expectations are, what forecasts are being made and, most importantly, what costs they are likely to incur should the scheme in the Bill need to be implemented. It is fair to say that the impact assessments published were delphic in the extreme on cost estimating. No figures were given, but there were a lot of words to suggest that there is an expectation that companies in the small and medium-sized haulage sector might seriously struggle with the cost when permits are introduced, particularly given that, on the face of it, it is going to be a full cost recovery system.
The Minister will say that it is too early and that we have not got to the point at which we need to do a lot of this, but at Second Reading she gave some indication of what the range of costs might be for individual permits. We need more information, and there ought to be an obligation on the Government to produce reports setting out forecasts and expectations for future arrangements and costs. Without those things, we will not have certainty in the industry, and the industry definitely needs certainty. From my discussions with the FTA I know that it is concerned not so much about the scheme itself as about how it will work, what the details of implementation will be, the burdens that it will place on its businesses and the likely impact on the haulage industry in the UK generally. These are not unreasonable concerns. We, as responsible legislators, ought to focus on that. I hope that the Government can come up with some answers and will commit to producing reports and assessments of the sort that these amendments describe.