Sarah Coombes MP: speeches

Speeches

• 23 Apr 2026 · Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) for securing this important debate. Roads are the arteries of our nation, keeping us and our economy moving, and the rules governing our roads rely on being able to identify vehicles and their drivers, which is the responsibility of the DVLA. It really matters. It matters to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for road tax to pay for upkeep; it matters to those of us who want to walk, drive and cycle safely; and it matters to the police, who can use number plates to work out who is using our roads. When the rules of the road are not enforced—when people flout them with no punishment—it degrades trust. I will highlight two elements of the DVLA systems that are failing: first, the regulation of number plate sales, and secondly, the rise of ghost vehicle owners due to there being no registered keeper. I will start with number plates, the little piece of plastic on the front of a vehicle, which most people hopefully never have to think too much about. Number plates are the quiet bedrock of how we enforce the rules of our roads. Number plates should tell us who owns a car, and they should be readable by cameras so that the police can use automatic number plate recognition software, which is essential for their work. In many other countries, number plates are treated as what they are—passports for our roads—and are highly regulated. In France, for example, vehicles are allocated a plate for life, with no changes permitted, and in many other countries only one or a few companies can sell plates. The UK system looks absurd in comparison. To become a number plate supplier here, someone simply pays a £40 one-off fee to the DVLA. There are no background checks and no criminal checks. This has led to a situation where the UK has more than 34,000 suppliers registered as selling number plates with the DVLA. For context, that is four times the number of petrol stations in Britain. If the DVLA had the ability to check that all those companies were doing the right thing—that they were asking for ownership documents and ID documents when they sold the number plate to someone, and only selling plates that were fully readable and not ghost plates—the situation would be fine, but the DVLA does not do that, and it will never be able to check so large a system. I have no doubt that most people buying a number plate are doing so for innocent reasons, but it is crystal clear that many people are buying dodgy number plates to make themselves invisible to speed cameras, to avoid paying road charges and to commit serious crimes, and unscrupulous sellers are allowing that to happen. To give an example, in 2025 a young man was murdered in cold blood in Slough, and the police eventually worked out that the killer’s car was using a cloned plate. When the police found the car, it had no plates on, but it had a stash of different registration plates in the back. They found the person who sold the cloned plates, and he was fined £5,500 and removed from the DVLA register for five years, after which time he is perfectly allowed to start selling number plates all over again. There is a live rape case, which I will not go into any detail on, where a driver used a ghost number plate on his vehicle when he committed the alleged offence. I have heard so many cases of drug dealers using ghost plates to go undetected by ANPR and fraudsters copying other people’s number plates. These dodgy companies sell cloned number plates without a second thought, and law-abiding drivers are left to pick up the pieces as they fight to prove that they are innocent of a crime or appeal against huge financial penalties. Dodgy number plate sellers are a public scandal waiting to happen. They are the next chapter in the candy shops or dodgy vape shops story. Those businesses are really fronts for money laundering and criminality. Rochdale trading standards has been superb at exposing this. Its work has uncovered links between DVLA-accredited suppliers and individuals with histories of murder, firearms, drugs, robbery and violent assault—you couldn’t make it up. In one of its inspections, it found 20 number plates that had been sold with none of the legally required ID checks or proof of vehicle checks. Almost half of those plates were later linked by the police to serious and organised crime. Rochdale trading standards officers described finding DVLA-registered suppliers operating out of back bedrooms and garden sheds. One supplier was at 33 Smith Street. The next supplier was at 35 Smith Street. I hope I am painting a picture of the serious systemic failings in how the DVLA operates number plate sales in Britain. With some estimates saying that up to one in 15 of all vehicles on UK roads has some kind of non-compliant plate, we can see the scale of the problem. Some of these suppliers are using ghost materials so routinely that even law-abiding members of the public may be inadvertently buying ghost plates. I urge anyone listening to this debate that if they need to buy a number plate, they should please ensure that the seller asks for their car ownership document and ID. If they do not, that person is buying from an illegal seller who is breaking the law. Last year, the all-party parliamentary group for transport safety carried out an inquiry into registration plates and made 10 recommendations, all of which I believe the Government should implement. They include banning the use of 3D and 4D plates, introducing background checks on suppliers and restricting the number of licensed sellers. I would like to praise the Government for committing to action on this in the road safety strategy, and in particular I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), who has been absolutely great. However, can the Minister update us on when he hopes some of these system changes will be made to tighten up the number plate system? In particular, will he ask the DVLA what is going on with banning 3D and 4D plates, which are the vast majority of ghost plates, and will he update us on when the next Department for Transport roadside survey will take place, because the last one was in 2023? I will now move on to the second topic that I am concerned about: vehicle registered keeper information. Even if a driver has a fully compliant number plate, it is still possible for them to cheat the rules and become a ghost on the roads in another way. All cars should have a registered keeper listed with the DLVA but, unfortunately, lax rules mean that many cars do not have, and their owners are therefore completely untraceable. Think about it: with hit and runs, excessive speeding and running red lights, even when a vehicle gets caught on camera doing any of those things, if the DVLA has no information about who owns the vehicle, there is no way to hold those people to account. According to the DVLA, 7% of vehicles have no registered keeper, and it argues that the majority of them are in the motor trade, but I just do not think that is true, and I have a personal anecdote to explain why. Last summer, I was out with the roads policing team in West Brom, and the ANPR monitor in the police car kept dinging every 30 seconds. I asked the officer, “What is setting off the ANPR?” and the officer said, “Those are cars with no registered keeper.” Today, The Guardian has covered a shocking freedom of information request made by the British Parking Association to the DVLA. When a car has no registered keeper or it has an outdated or incorrect keeper address, the DVLA sometimes registers the vehicle to its own address. The DVLA has admitted in answer to this FOI request that, at the latest count, 18,260 vehicles are currently registered to its own office in Swansea. The rise of these ghost owners undermines our ability to enforce the rules of our roads, and it is not just a safety risk. I spoke to the Motor Insurers’ Bureau about the rise in the number of collisions when one party cannot be traced because the vehicle has no registered keeper, the number plate is fake or a ghost plate, or the driver raced away. We all pay a premium on our insurance to cover the costs when uninsured or untraceable drivers are involved in a collision, and that adds up to £50 on the insurance premiums of all of us every year. There is also a big cost, or rather a big loss, to the public sector through this issue. I feel the pain as much as anyone does when I get slapped with a parking ticket when I think I have done the right thing, or I get a fine for driving down the wrong road. However, some people are flouting the rules constantly, and they are getting away with it by having a car with no registered keeper, or registering with a NIP—notice of impending prosecution—farm so their fine gets sent to a totally anonymous post office box and the fine does not get passed on. Since I started doing this work, I have realised how much of an issue unpaid fines are. In Hackney, for example, a single individual owes the council £250,000. I recently asked my council, Sandwell, how much it was owed, and I was shocked to discover that almost one third of penalty charge notices had gone unpaid since last April, equating to £1.2 million. Can hon. Members imagine what that money could have been spent on? I will finish because I know other Members want to speak. A great many good people work in the DVLA, as the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole mentioned, and I know that because I have spoken to lots of them. What is failing here is the system, including how we sell the very plates that identify all our vehicles, and how we regulate and monitor who actually owns the cars on our roads. I know the DVLA has a lot on, but this is a very serious problem, and there is huge opportunity to grasp here, to fix the system for the future.

• 11 Mar 2026 · Public Body Data Collection: Sikh and Jewish Ethnicity · Hansard source

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  I am proud to represent a very large Sikh community in Sandwell, which is near my hon. Friend’s constituency. What she campaigns for—for ethnicity data about the Sikh community to be recorded—is really important for organisations such as the NHS as well as for Home Office data and crime data. We have suffered some very serious anti-Sikh hate crime in West Bromwich recently, which the community is very upset about, and I am standing with them against it. Can she say more about how recording this data will help not just NHS and health data, but other types of public data?

• 8 Jan 2026 · Road Safety Strategy · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for all her hard work on this strategy—I have no doubt that it will save lives. I have spent the last year campaigning against ghost number plates, which make drivers invisible to speed and police cameras. These plates are great for car racers and criminals and terrible for the rest of us. They have spent years going under the radar, but today they have been rumbled, and I am delighted the Minister has announced a massive crackdown on these plates. How soon will these dodgy ghost-plate drivers start to get penalty points on their licence and their vehicles seized for using these plates, and when will we start to see these MOT number plate checks?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Jury Trials Proposal: Impact · Hansard source

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  I have heard heartbreaking stories of women from my constituency who have waited years for their abuser to be brought to trial. The crisis that has developed in our courts is having a devastating impact on victims. Given that many of the previous reforms to judge, jury and magistrate trials over the past 50 years were also intended to speed up the system, will the Secretary of State outline how these proposed changes will fix the broken system and deliver swift justice for victims?

• 28 Oct 2025 · Connected and Automated Vehicles · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered connected and automated vehicles. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. Yesterday, I jumped in a car with a couple of other people near King’s Cross station. It was a pretty normal journey. We watched the world go by, chatted and got stuck in a bit of traffic. The journey was completely ordinary, except for one thing: the car was driving itself. That 20-minute journey represents the future of what our roads could look like, which is why I am pleased to be leading today’s debate. I originally applied for this debate for reasons related to road safety. I have met too many families in my constituency who have lost a husband or a mother through other people’s dangerous driving. I am fascinated by how automation and technology could help us to eradicate road danger and death, but getting deeper into this topic, my speech will focus on not only safety but accessibility and economic growth. Turning first to safety, in the UK, 30,000 people are killed or seriously injured on our roads each year. If we speak to the police, they will say that most deadly crashes are caused by the “fatal five”—speeding, drink and drug driving, mobile phone use, antisocial driving, and not wearing a seatbelt. I do not need to be a machine learning expert to know that automated vehicles, trained by safe, expert drivers and programmed to comply with the strict rules of the road, could avoid all five of those issues and the needless death they cause. A self-driving car is not going to be drunk, high or scrolling through TikTok. During the passage of the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, the last Government rightly put safety at the heart of the regulation, stating that a self-driving vehicle should be at least as safe as a competent and careful driver. There are still some questions about what exactly that means. In the US, where the roll-out of autonomous vehicles and robotaxis is far ahead of here, the safety statistics on automated versus human-driven vehicles look impressive. Waymo, the Google-owned company that runs self-driving taxis there, claims that its vehicles have 80% fewer injury-causing crashes compared with the average human driver, but within the human average there will be drivers who are neither careful nor competent, so these figures are quite hard to compare. What progress has the Minister made on expanding the safety expectations for automated and connected vehicles, and what is the timeline on the remaining regulations that need to be set out? Furthermore, what do the Government hope the safety gains from automated vehicles could be? Proving the reliability and safety of automated vehicles is essential for public acceptance of this new technology. Lots of people might feel reticent to get in a self-driving car because they do not feel safe, but I found my own experience yesterday in a Wayve autonomous vehicle reassuring. During the journey, we had cyclists jumping red lights, pedestrians walking out on to the road and other drivers cutting across our right of way. The car dealt with it all. The whole journey felt safe and smooth the whole time. Some critics say that these cars cannot handle British roundabouts because they were made for American grid cities. I can confirm that the Wayve car handled the roundabouts with ease. We had a safety driver sat ready to take the wheel if any issues arose, but none did. Other areas of safety are important to mention too. In a world where cyber-attacks are becoming more common and more devastating, there is a fear that fully connected and autonomous vehicles could be hacked. Could the Minister say more about that and the protections that are being put in place? Another key element is data sharing, particularly in the event of a collision involving cars that are either fully automated or have advanced autopilot systems. The latter is where a vehicle can steer itself, but drivers must keep their eyes on the road, ready to assume control if needed. Many of these driver-assist functions are important safety enhancers, and these functions, including things such as lane assist, should not be so easily turned off. However, in other countries, there have been examples of cars in self-driving modes where collisions have occurred, and companies have refused to share all the data with families and authorities. Is the Minister confident that we will not have the same issue here? My personal campaign this year has been to address the wild west that is the British number plate regulation system. The traditional number plate, as the public identifier or passport of a vehicle, has been mandatory since the Motor Car Act 1903, but they are still as important as ever—even more so for determining ownership in the era of driverless cars. Can the Minister, who is in charge of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, reassure me that he is looking at the gaping holes in regulation of number plates and the sale of vast numbers of illegal ghost and cloned plates?

• 16 Sept 2025 · Sentencing Bill · Hansard source

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  When this Government came into power last year, we inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse. After 14 years of Tory neglect and underfunding, our prisons were at breaking point. If we had not acted, prison places would have run out within weeks. When our prisons are full, violence rises, putting prison officers at risk. When no cells are available, suspects cannot be held in custody, which means that vanloads of dangerous people are circling the country with nowhere to go. That is the appalling situation that the Conservatives left us with. Rather than letting that happen, this Government took decisive action and are ensuring the future of the system by introducing this landmark piece of legislation. There are many forward-thinking measures in this Bill. This is about creating a sentencing system that punishes those who commit crime, ensuring that victims see justice served. It is also about creating a system that works for rehabilitating those who have committed crime and, critically, preventing reoffending. Similarly to the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), I will focus my remarks on driving bans and vehicle crime. Since becoming an MP, I have heard countless stories from families and individuals who have lost loved ones or had loved ones seriously injured on our roads. I have heard horrific stories of grandmothers killed in hit-and-runs, and of tiny toddlers whose lives have been cut short by drivers racing around in stolen cars and fleeing the scene. These families have been let down by huge backlogs that have been in the system for years. I have been working closely with the charity RoadPeace, which was mentioned earlier. It has opened my eyes to all the ways in which the system is failing. I was shocked to find out that even after someone has been charged with causing death by dangerous driving, they are often allowed to continue driving until they are actually found guilty, which can take years and years; that may be similar to the case that was just mentioned. The thing I found most shocking is that once offenders are released from prison, they often have incredibly short driving bans. One such case is that of a woman who ended up in prison after taking the life of a man from Tividale in my area. Martyn Gall was an experienced cyclist. He was killed by a woman who was on her phone for her entire journey—sending messages, taking pictures and using social media apps behind the wheel. The first call she made after hitting Martyn was not 999; it was to her sister. That driver was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, but following her release she will have a driving ban of only five years—which I and Diane, Martyn’s wife, think is far too lenient for the suffering that she has caused. Another indication of the historical failure of the system is the chronic rate of reoffending in our country. We know that half of all crime in the UK is committed by just 10% of offenders. The campaign group Crush Crime has highlighted examples of chronic offenders, who commit crime again and again. Unfortunately, the same is true of serious driving offences. Data released to me following a parliamentary question shows that nearly 20% of offenders convicted of dangerous driving in 2024 had committed a similar offence previously. Of those offenders, 6% had received several convictions for dangerous driving, and the worse the offence, the higher the reoffending rate. While nearly 20% of those convicted of dangerous driving were reoffenders, less than 5% of those convicted of careless driving had a previous conviction. The length of bans given to those who commit these serious offences needs to be much longer. Let me give the House some examples. One man hit a 13-year-old girl in a 60 mph hit and run. The child suffered life-changing injuries. The perpetrator already had a conviction for dangerous driving, yet when he was released from prison, he only received a five-year driving ban. In another case, a woman who was doing 60 mph in a 30 zone smashed into a taxi. She was uninsured, was under the influence of cannabis, and had a baby in the front seat. It was her second driving conviction that week, but she was given a driving ban of just two years and five months. Jane Haynes, a campaigning journalist from the Birmingham Mail, alerted me to one of the very worst cases I have heard of. Grant Meredith-Trafford was doing more than double the 30 mph limit on Tipton Road in the Black Country when he mowed down and killed a 64-year-old pedestrian in January 2023. The driver sped away and tried to cover his tracks—he went on the run for weeks and hid in a country hotel. The most shocking part is that he was already disqualified from driving. Following the crash, he was jailed for 15 years and banned from driving for 17 years. Even though the judge described the case as “one of the most serious cases of its kind…in recent times”, the offender still did not receive a lifetime driving ban. I think most of the public would be shocked that some of these people will ever be allowed behind the wheel again, yet the reality is that just 1% of people who were convicted of causing death by dangerous driving in 2024 had their licences revoked for life. I think the public would also be shocked to realise how many people with 12 points on their licence are still on our roads. In 2021, research by Cycling UK found that one in five people were spared an automatic ban when they reached 12 points by claiming exceptional hardship—for example, that they needed their car for their job. In my view, if a person requires a licence for their job, they should be extra careful on our roads. The exceptional hardship frame is being applied far too liberally, and this loophole needs to be addressed. I encourage Ministers to look at how we can tighten up the rules around that loophole and lengthen driving bans as this Bill progresses through Parliament. My final point is how important it is that the Bill uses driving bans as part of community sentences and licence conditions. Driving is a privilege, not an inalienable right, and vehicle crime is often linked to other types of crime. It is absolutely correct that a driving ban is one of the options available to judges to ensure a tough sentence for offenders who receive a community sentence or are released on licence. At the heart of this Bill is the question of how we deliver justice for victims, tough punishments for perpetrators, and protection for the public. After years of failure by the Conservative party, I am proud that this Government will take the strong action needed to fix our prison system and ensure criminal justice in Britain is working once more.

• 16 Sept 2025 · Sentencing Bill · Hansard source

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  In the spirit of honesty, does the shadow Minister recognise that it was the previous Government who left our prisons at 99% capacity for most of the recent years? They let out 10,000 prisoners, largely in secret, and brought our criminal justice system to the brink of collapse. Does he take responsibility for all of that?