Clean Road Transport Vehicles

Avid readers of our e-updates (including our e-update of 16 March 2010) will recall the European Commission adopted earlier this year Directive 2009/33/EC to promote the purchase of clean and energy efficient vehicles through public procurement exercises. As from 4 December 2010, The Cleaner Road Transport Vehicles (Scotland) Regulations 2010 came into force to implement those obligations in Scotland.

As such, the Regulations now impose a specific new requirement on all Contracting Authorities, Contracting Entities and operators (a body which discharges certain public service obligations of public transport services by rail and by road) to assess the environmental impacts of vehicles when procuring road transport vehicles, albeit there are exclusions for procuring some vehicles, such as those designed and constructed for forces maintaining public order.

The Directive laid out three Options in relation to how operational and environmental impacts may be taken into account. Those Options are replicated in the Regulations, and so an Authority may:

Set out an appropriate technical specification for energy and environmental performance; Use the impacts as award criteria; or Apply a specific methodology to convert the impacts into monetary value. The methodology of calculation - based on the operational...