The Commission presented a report on the implementation of Regulation (EU) No 70/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the statistical returns in respect of the carriage of goods by road.
Regulation (EU) Nº 70/2012 was designed to provide the Commission, other EU institutions and national governments with comparable, reliable, harmonised, regular and comprehensive statistical data on the scale and development of the carriage of goods by road. These data are needed for framing, monitoring and evaluating EU policy.
The Commission considers that the experience gained and results obtained with the implementation of Regulation (EU) Nº 70/2012 can be considered as largely positive. The resources allocated to maintain statistical production at both national and Commission level have permitted the production of comparable and high-quality results.
The Commission:
The report concludes that the Regulation has proven to be an efficient and effective tool for the production of high quality reliable and comparable road freight transport statistics at both EU and national level, avoiding duplication of work. All Member States delivered the requested datasets, with delays only in a small number of cases, mainly due to IT changes at national level. This makes it possible to produce high quality and reliable statistics on road freight transport in Europe.
In one Member State, the national road freight transport survey was replaced by the road freight survey under Regulation (EU) No 70/2012. The Commission encouraged other Member States to follow this example.
In addition, the statistics produced are regularly used for monitoring and assessing road freight transport policies at national and EU level.
Several task force and working group meetings have taken place with Member States in 2015-
2016 to examine and propose ways of improving data quality and reducing the data collection burden, and to discuss the feasibility of collecting information on empty truck journeys on a mandatory basis and data related to trucks’ fuel consumption. Member States still hesitate to agree to a mandatory collection of such information, due to the related increase in the reporting burden.
At the same time, the report notes an improvement in the availability of statistics reported on a voluntary basis by Member States. Furthermore efforts for producing more detailed statistics on fuel consumption in the transport sector are made in energy statistics ensuring coherence with the overall energy balances.