Earl Attlee (Con)

My Lords, as well as moving my Amendment 403, I shall also speak to my Amendments 403A, 404, 413, 416D and 416M. We now come to amendments concerned with abnormal load movements and how the police manage them. At Second Reading, I outlined the problem, which is partly about certain officers taking unnecessary steps to justify their existence but mostly it is about the money. I understand that the video clip of my Second Reading speech has been shared through industry social media at least 15,000 times. I am very grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Hanson and Lord Katz, for organising a meeting with the policy-determining Minister at the Home Office and appropriate officials and police representatives next week. This will be very helpful. This means that I can avoid wearying the Committee with several highly technical groups of amendments and instead have only one group. I remind the Committee that I own and operate a tank transporter on behalf of the REME Museum; Ministers have full details. I have not been personally affected by the problems that I will seek to address. Before going any further, I would like to say a word about traffic officers. We should all be really grateful to these officers, who work tirelessly to improve road safety. I have never been proceeded against for a traffic offence, but I can understand how irritating that must be. However, prosecutions and enforcement action are necessary to reduce casualties on the road. We must also remember that it is traffic police officers who have to attend the scene of devastating road traffic accidents. There are 43 police forces in England and Wales, and my amendments concern only about eight, which I will politely describe as being errant. The 35 others operate the legislation known as the special types general order—SDGO—as intended. They are not a problem, and they should be proud of their work. The legislation is fit for purpose so long as all involved act in good faith. Guess which police force does not do so and seeks to lead the others astray? As I explained at Second Reading, West Midlands Police—WMP—has increased its income from escorting abnormal loads from £14,000 to £1.1 million in five years. Not surprisingly, West Midlands Police is stalling on FoI requests from industry, as is West Yorkshire Police. WMP and about seven others are persecuting and harassing the heavy haulage industry when it is not necessary or proportionate. If it were, we would see the excellent commercial vehicle unit of the Metropolitan Police adopting the same tactics and policies. We do not. The Met’s income from escorting abnormal loads has remained static and modest. The tactics employed by West Midlands Police are the ones that you would expect to see used by a corrupt police force in a slowly developing country. These include seeking unnecessary technical details that can later be checked for preciseness, deliberately misquoting or misapplying regulations, and prohibiting vehicle movements when there is no power to do so. By unnecessarily insisting that each abnormal load notification refers to only one vehicle registration number, the number of abnormal load notifications, but not movements, has increased by about 100% nationally. The regulations have not changed; this is purely the result of a few junior police officers screwing up the system. I produced a report—it was dated 10 May 2024, so I am not jumping on the bandwagon—in which I stated, on my personal honour as a Member of your Lordships’ House, that I personally witnessed officers of the West Midlands Police harass drivers and crew of one of the most professional heavy haulage companies in the land. They did this by checking every conceivable document and measuring and examining everything possible. I knew that they would be doing this, because I was told that they had done it on each of the preceding three days. Such excessive and overzealous checks are interfering with the smooth running of the heavy haulage industry, which is racking up significant extra costs in all the wasted time spent responding to these demands. Some businesses are having to take on extra staff just to deal with the bureaucracy generated by these police forces. I look forward to the contribution of the noble Lord, Faulkner of Worcester. As I said, these repetitive checks are largely unnecessary and serve only to justify the productivity-reducing activities of the police officers involved. The Committee may ask itself why the industry does not just complain to the IOPC. I am sorry to say that the IOPC is not well placed to understand these technical issues. Furthermore, for reasons of resources and practicality, the IOPC has to refer relatively minor matters back to the professional standards department of the police force that gave rise to the industry complaint. It is obvious that such a complaint being referred back to West Midlands Police would have no effect, as that police force is hopelessly compromised by the amount of money involved, and, as we have seen recently, it is dysfunctional. I am sure that I do not need to remind your Lordships that, in addition to my concerns, we have all seen this week that the Home Secretary has lost confidence in the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, and I support her. Even at the highest level, West Midlands Police officers appear to be unable to separate fact from fiction. In my dealings with the Assistant Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, Mike O’Hara, it appears that he has done nothing about the documentary evidence that I presented to him setting out that something is going very seriously wrong with its internal procedures. I can privately share the evidence with your Lordships. The Committee may also ask why the industry does not resort to judicial review. The answer is that it did about 12 months ago. Unfortunately, as the Committee will understand, the judicial system is collapsing, because both this Government and the previous Government have not properly resourced it. It also appears to be overwhelmed by numerous people-type cases, often involving convention rights. As a result, JRs of a commercial nature are not being considered by the court with any great priority. I now turn to the issue of police escort charges. There are no regulations about how much a police force can charge for providing a police escort and in what circumstances. Nearly every day, West Midlands Police will charge several different heavy hauliers for a minimum six-hour shift, even though the actual time spent escorting the load could be as short as 30 minutes. It will use the same team of officers for each job. The charge is £2,500 per time, which far exceeds the total cost of the heavy haulage itself, which commands only about £2,000 per day. My Amendment 413 would require the Secretary of State to make regulations about charging for police escorts, and it is expected largely to deal with the behaviour issues. It is very strongly supported by the industry. If the Minister wants to claim that this is an operational matter for the police, surely the same should apply to firearms licensing fees. That is what is behind my probing Amendment 414, which I hope that the Minister will not accept. In most police forces, the officers or officials who make the decision about whether a load needs to be escorted by the police are not the ones who pick up the overtime payments. In West Midlands Police, they very much are. My Amendment 416M would prevent this.