As transport spokesman for the Conservatives in the European Parliament I have been fighting for the past few months to dilute measures set to be imposed by the new drivers' licence directive, which will be passed back from the Council of Ministers to the European Parliament in the autumn for its second reading.

The main areas of concern were and remain: compulsory medical checks, where drivers with common health complaints, such as those fitted with pace-makers and those suffering non-insulin dependent diabetes, who will be made to undergo frequent and expensive health-checks to keep their licences, set only to add extra bureaucracy to the UK's tried and tested system which monitors drivers and is acknowledged as among the safest in Europe.

Owners of motorcycles would see extra driving tests when graduating to more powerful machines to replace the proven British method of simply illustrating previous riding experience; and driving licence renewals, which would force road users to renew their drivers' licence every five to ten years, a proposal both highly cumbersome and completely unnecessary.

The reality is that these three points of contention which we worked so hard to water down and in some cases remove, have been restored to the text by the Council of Ministers and we will be forced to endure the same arguments all over again when we deal with the proposal at second reading.

As always, I will endeavour to keep readers informed of these developments in these pieces of legislation as they progress.