Motor Vehicles (Driving Licences) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2025

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

Monday 19th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, as the Minister has explained, this is a very narrow and technical instrument, but it has some very interesting and indeed rather sinister ramifications.

If we start with the first interesting ramification, we could talk, at least briefly, about the state of the roads. There is a great deal of complaint about potholes in the road. I would go a little bit further. I suggest that there are many roads in this country now which do not merely have potholes, but where the base of the road—its underlying structure—is now seriously damaged and has not been properly maintained. It is true that this was not looked after well by the previous Government, but it has got worse under the current Government.

I was in Oxfordshire at the weekend. I drove along one road in the country that was in such an appalling condition that it was reminiscent of the sort of 19th-century travel writing one reads of enterprising journeys into Calabria and strange and unexplored parts of Europe at the time. This road was virtually about to break up completely. Our roads are falling to pieces and the Government are doing nothing about it.

Why is that relevant to this instrument? I can hear noble Lords asking that question—gasping in fact, in exasperation to try to know the answer. The relevance is that the principal reason why roads are breaking up in this country is the weight of vehicles: not the occasional juggernaut that passes down an Oxfordshire lane, but the relentless beating they take from heavier and heavier vehicles. Part of that is due to the fashion for SUVs, which I personally deprecate and cannot entirely understand, but a great deal of the rest of it is to do with the fact that electric vehicles are, as the Minister has said, notably heavier than petrol vehicles. That is what is breaking up our roads. This Government are doing nothing at all about it, and it is getting worse. They said they would be better than the last Government—they are not making those improvements.

That brings us to the instrument, which tries to make it easier for vehicles to be heavier, if I can put it that way. It removes certain restrictions that have been placed on the driving of heavier electric vehicles.

We should start from the point that the purpose of putting conditions on driving licences, which we have done for many decades, almost since they started, is to achieve road safety. That is why we have different licences matching different sorts of vehicles. The conditions that the Minister is removing today were put in place for safety reasons. The Government are making the case that they are no longer required for safety reasons, and the Official Opposition accept that. So to the extent that these restrictions are being removed, we have no objection to it on safety grounds; the Government have made that case. But they are being removed solely for electric vehicles, and it is very important to draw two conclusions from this.

First, the Government are sending, whatever the Minister says, a very powerful signal to people trying to develop synthetic and alternative fuels—the limits are not being reduced and the conditions are not being removed for those—that they do not matter. The Government have made their choice: their option is to back electric. They are not backing the alternatives. That is the first message, and it is not a good one. It was, as the noble Lord says, aired in the other place.

The second point, which was not, I think, aired in the other place, but is an important one, is that the Government are doing this because, as set out in paragraph 5.6 of the Explanatory Memorandum:

“Although alternatively fuelled vehicles produce less CO2 emissions than petrol and diesel vehicles, alternatively fuelled vehicles still produce CO2 emissions at the tailpipe. Consequently, these vehicles would not meet the Government’s objective for all new cars and vans to be zero-emission at the tailpipe by 2035”.


This is what is sinister: this is the first time that conditions have been attached to driving licences, not for the purpose of road safety, not to match skill to the type of vehicle being driven, but to achieve a government net-zero policy. In principle, it opens the door to other measures whereby driving licences are restricted so as to match government policy on net zero. Those people, many of them on lower incomes, who are dependent on internal combustion engines and will probably never be able to afford an electric vehicle as things stand, will find themselves squeezed out of the possibility of driving them as more and more restrictions are placed on their driving licence. This would be a genuinely sinister and worrying trend. The Government should be ashamed, quite frankly, of paragraph 5.6 of the Explanatory Memorandum, and they should repudiate it.

Finally, of course, a driving licence is no use whatsoever if you cannot get a driving test, another point that arises from this. It is again true that the Government inherited a large backlog of driving test bookings—people could not get through—but that has now risen to a queue of 600,000 people waiting for a driving test. The Government, although we aired this in the House recently by way of an Oral Question, are making no progress on this; things are going backwards. They are not better than their predecessor on this—they are palpably and measurably worse. I hope the Minister can address that point as well.

This instrument in itself is not objectionable—except for the signal it sends to synthetic fuel manufacturers and, most importantly, the introduction of the principle that driving licences can be manipulated to achieve other government policies. This is also an opportunity for the Government to explain why money is not being put in, on the other hand, to strengthening our roads to carry these heavy vehicles—rather, the roads are breaking up—and what they are doing to make a driving licence a reality by allowing people access to driving tests. I beg to move.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I do not have any argument with the Government over their laudable environmental and other objectives in bringing forward these regulations, but I have a question that is really to do with the physics of the matter. We know that kinetic energy is a key, or perhaps the key, determinant in the severity of and damage caused by road accidents. Kinetic energy is of course calculated as half of the mass times the square of the velocity.

Essentially, if, as I understand it, the Government are content that it is safe for a category B licence holder to drive a 4.25 tonne vehicle powered by zero-emissions means, why is it not safe for that same driver to drive another vehicle powered by any other means? In the event of a road accident or collision, the power source of the vehicle the category B driver is at the wheel of will make no difference to the brakes and tyres, and to the impact caused to the other vehicle involved in the accident.

When we are legislating on road safety, we have to take into account the realities and physics of the matter as well as other government objectives, such as decarbonisation, laudable though they may be. I would be very grateful if the Minister could answer that question.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, as the Minister points out, we have a large electric car market; as my noble friend Lord Moylan on the Front Bench points out, what we have is a market for large electric cars. I ask the Minister: why does that continue to be the case?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their consideration of these draft regulations. Having listened closely to the concerns expressed, I will respond to the points raised.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, started with the state of the roads and potholes. I admire his brave actions in driving around the roads of Oxfordshire at the weekend. He says the Government are doing nothing about it. That is far from true. The Government announced a £1.6 billion investment in the state of the roads and remedying potholes only in April. Incidentally, the damage to the roads is an exponential function of vehicle weight. A heavy lorry does far more damage to a road surface than an electric car, or indeed one of these vehicles at 4.25 tonnes rather than 3.5 tonnes. The noble Lord noted that he accepts the principle of these regulations on safety grounds.

The message to synthetic and alternative fuel manufacturers is not that they do not matter—what they are doing is valuable. The noble Lord knows, and he quoted paragraph 5.6, that it reduces carbon emissions, but in the end does not eliminate them.

The noble Lord is—or his party and the previous Government were—committed to decarbonising transport. Earlier this afternoon my noble friend Lord Katz answered the noble Lord’s question with the quotation:

“I believe that the struggle for decarbonised transport, clean development and clean air is as important as the struggle for clean water was in the 19th century”.


They are the words of Grant Shapps, the former Conservative Transport Secretary, and were as apposite a response to the earlier question as they are now to this debate. Decarbonisation is really important and prioritising vehicles that have zero emissions is really important for this Government.

The noble Lord also referred to driving tests, and he is right that the position that this Government inherited was dreadful—there were many, many people waiting for them. I have already answered questions in this House about reducing waiting times and recruiting more instructors, but it will take time to do that because remedying this position is not immediate. The Government’s aim is to reduce waiting times to seven weeks by summer 2026, and we will achieve that.

The noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, referred to the effects of kinetic energy. He is right that mass matters in road accidents, but the Government have looked into this quite seriously and the available data suggests that 3.5 tonne to 4.25 tonne electric vehicles are no more likely than their 3.5 tonne petrol and diesel equivalents to be involved in collisions.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I was not making that point at all. I was saying that if the noble Lord’s ministerial car broke down at a roundabout and he was hit from behind by a 3.5 tonne vehicle and a colleague was hit by a 4.25 tonne vehicle, the latter would involve 20% more energy transfer and therefore 20% more potential for severity. Would he accept the simple physics of the argument? I am not suggesting that one is more likely to have an accident than the other.