DEPARTMENT FOR TRANSPORT DELAYS REFORM

The Rt Hon Stephen Hammond MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport

I understand that the Department for Transport, which had planned to publish a response to the consultation process this month, is about to announce a postponement to later this Autumn.  

The Minister's consultation paper, Review of the Uninsured and Untraced Drivers Agreements was published on 27 February this year.  It was criticised, here and elsewhere, for its limited scope. 

The Minister  received a number of detailed consultation responses advising him that his proposals were badly flawed.   This is because they fail to address the many long-standing defects in our national law implementation of European Community law.  These require the UK to conform to certain minimum standards concerning (i) the insurance cover for civil liability arising out of the use of motor vehicles and (ii) the compensatory protection afforded to victims.  

Although the Department has received very detailed submissions that exhaustively explain these problems,  itemising each infraction complained of, and setting out proposals for remedying these defects, no reaction to  has been forthcoming so far.

The Department needs to appreciate that unless the Minister gives a clear and unequivocal commitment to the wide-ranging reform that is required under Community law and that this is also accompanied by a sufficiently detailed explanation of the proposed reforms, together with an acceptable time-scale for implementing the reform process, then the Department is likely to be the subject of an infringement complaint to the European Commission.  Time is not on his side.