UK Parliament / Open data

Drivers’ Hours, Tachographs, International Road Haulage and Licensing of Operators (Amendment) Regulations 2022

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. It has been really good to hear so many questions to the Minister, and I am grateful to her for the answers she has given—most of them, anyway.

I still find it extraordinary that although we have this legislation which requires tachographs to be installed, she could not seem to tell us how many suppliers there are. In this country, we have some pretty good examples of monopoly suppliers of large volumes of things that have gone horribly wrong, particularly in the health service. This kind of equipment should be available from many manufacturers, and I am not quite sure why we can have only the ones that the EU says. We obviously have to comply, but there we are. I think that a cost of £1,200 plus installation is pretty high for many operators. I am sure they will be able to do some financial wizardry with it, but it is still quite a lot of money, though it is for a good purpose.

I worry about the cabotage issue, because we still have traffic problems at Dover and many other places quite often. The freight industry is short of drivers. We used to have a situation in which probably only 10% of cross-channel road freight was done by British drivers. Whatever we think, we have to find the drivers somewhere if we cannot find them here, otherwise we will not get the goods across.

I hope we will keep this under review and I look forward to the Minister’s letter, which may be quite long. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment to the Motion.

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

825 c593 

Session

2022-23

Chamber / Committee

House of Lords chamber
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