Attlee will press ahead with legislation for impounding
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by Karen Miles The chances of cowboy operators losing their trucks rose this week as a peer pledged to fight on to introduce the necessary rules. Earl Attlee, Conservative transport spokesman in the Lords, says the broad intent of last week's transport hill would allow attempts either in the Commons or Lords to add an impounding amendment.
If MPs fail to add impounding to the transport bill then Attlee says he will introduce a Lords' amendment. Failing that, he will make another attempt to introduce a private member's bill on the subject. "It is a priority for me," he says. "We need it because unfair and illegal competition means everyone is having to sail very close to the wind."
If Attlee's plans take hold, new laws to impound trucks found without an Operator's Licence could be in place within a couple of years.
The wording on the bill to "make provision about transport" is deliberately vague to invite supplementary political activity from the Commons and Lords. Attlee is already making approaches to John Prescotts transport and environ ment departmental empire.
The introduction of impounding would need primary legislation to allow the Vehicle Inspectorate and the police to take vehicles found running without 0-licences. Secondary legislation would then be needed to stipulate exactly how the authorities could go about it.
Impounding would have to wait until the Traffic Area Office's computer systems were capable of acknowledging immediately whether a vehicle was covered by an 0-licence. It would also mean operators telling their Traffic Area Offices as soon as vehicles were changed on their licences and an end to the margin on vehicle numbers currently allowed.
The initiative is bound to attract praise from the Freight Transport and Road Haulage Associations, which had hoped to see impounding included in last week's bill. The bill did lay down government plans to allow local authorities to charge drivers for entering urban areas and to ring-fence the collected money for local transport projects.
It also made provision for the introduction of charges on trunk roads, at the request of the local authority, and on trunk road bridges and tunnels over 600 metres in length.
"This will provide additional funding to build large, costly structures," says the Department of Transport.