Local Transport Bill [HL]

Clause 109 should not be in the Bill because it is a tax-raising Bill, and noble Lords will know that we do not debate tax-raising Bills in your Lordships’ House. Clause 109 creates a power for the National Assembly for Wales to gain legislative competence over schemes for charging for the use of trunk roads in Wales and the application of the proceeds of those charges to transport purposes. Under the Government of Wales Act 2006, the Welsh Assembly can acquire legislative competence in areas defined in Schedule 5 to the Act. In such areas, the Assembly is effectively a Parliament and can make measures which supplement, amend or repeal any existing Act of Parliament or any subordinate legislation. There are two ways to acquire legislative competence. One is through the legislative competence order, or LCO, procedure, by which the Assembly requests that a matter be added to its legislative competence. The Secretary of State lays a draft order in Parliament. If both Houses approve it the measure is added. Although complicated, we on this side broadly support this process. The other is through the direct addition of matters to the schedule through primary legislation. Broadly speaking, we disapprove of this process for three reasons: first, a provision on Wales in a broader Bill may not be adequately scrutinised, especially if the Bill is timetabled in the Commons. Secondly, it involves the transfer of powers that the Assembly has not requested. Thirdly, we suspect a trend in which departments transfer competence rather than draft legislation applicable to Wales for reasons of administrative convenience. With regard to the Local Transport Bill, we are concerned that the power transferred appears to have been requested privately by Welsh Ministers and not by the Assembly as a whole. Ministers have not said how or even whether they intend to use these powers. The powers would allow for a Wales-wide system of road charging. At present, Welsh Ministers can only levy charges on trunk roads to support local road pricing schemes at the request of local authorities. We support this limited, localist level of road charging. However, UK Ministers have rejected the notion of nationwide road pricing under considerable pressure from the Conservatives—this side of the House. We believe that the provision would allow Wales to become a stalking horse for a UK-wide scheme. We are also concerned that the power effectively licenses the Assembly to levy taxation within Wales. This would be a profound constitutional move as the Assembly, unlike the Scottish Parliament, has no power of taxation. As the only real means of revenue raising, this could mean that road pricing would provide a cash cow for the Assembly. We do not want that, do we? The money is only hypothecated to transport, not, as Peter Hain appeared to suggest in the other place, for the maintenance of roads or the funding of new relief roads. In extremis, and this may be dreamlike, it could be used to fund the Welsh Ministers’ drivers. Moreover, this limited degree of hypothecation will allow the Assembly to slash what it currently provides from the block grant for transport purposes and use that money elsewhere. Effectively, therefore, the hypothecation would not stop the Clause 109 powers being used as a form of general revenue raising. I repeat, we see this clause as a tax-raising power and believe that it should not be here. We are not anti-devolution per se, but we are against the way in which the powers in Clause 109 are framed—its vagueness, its constitutional aspects and its ability to be used to impose an unwanted road charging system on Welsh drivers, farmers, hauliers, tourists et al. I beg to move.